Adversarial Review (1 blogmarks)

Justin Searls wrote about adversarial review saying:

Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead. The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can't believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior

More and more of the code review that I do day-to-day is agent driven and I’m constantly looking for ways to make it more effective. This sounds compelling, so I’m looking into how to approach adversarial review.

Adversarial code review applies the maker-checker principle to AI coding agents: the agent that writes a change never certifies it. The pattern uses a distinct reviewer role to check code produced by a builder role against the spec before human review. An implementation can add opposing reviewer roles. A primary reviewer proposes findings, a challenger tries to disprove them and hunt for missed issues, and an arbiter weighs both sides and decides what blocks the merge.

While looking for tips on how to get started with adversarial reviews, I came across a reddit post that made a simple but surprisingly effective recommendation.

ask: *write a prompt for an adversarial reviewer.*

The OP goes on to say:

You'll probably get a carefully considered prompt with excellent context you can paste straight into a fresh claude (or better yet, Codex/GPT 5.4) session. It'll almost certainly find at least a few things that would've cost you much more time later.

A couple variations I've tried for this today:

1. "Can you write a prompt for an adversarial reviewer for this feature?"

2. "Can you write a prompt for an adversarial feature / design doc review? It should be generic, but I will use it to review a single Linear issue that represents an epic (several user stories for a whole feature)."