Adversarial Review

Claude Code skill for adversarial AI code and plan review.

One AI writes the code. Another tears it apart. Iterate until approved.

What is this

Most AI code review tools validate your changes — “looks good, maybe add tests.” Adversarial review does the opposite: the reviewer defaults to skepticism and tries to break confidence in the change. It looks for what will fail in production, not what might be nice to improve.

This is a Claude Code skill — a SKILL.md file plus a small references/runner.md that together teach Claude how to run adversarial reviews through an external AI model (currently OpenAI Codex).

Key features

• Plan review — review the plan BEFORE writing code. Catch architecture mistakes, missing steps, and risks early
• Code review — review the implementation. Bugs, security, data loss
• Code-vs-plan — verify the implementation matches the plan
• Iterative — Claude fixes issues based on reviewer feedback and resubmits for re-review. Up to 5 rounds until approved
• Lightweight — SKILL.md + one references/runner.md (thin runner subagent spec), no server, no broker, no external runtime deps. Compare with codex-plugin-cc: ~15 JS modules, App Server, JSON-RPC broker, lifecycle hooks

How it works

┌─────────┐     ┌──────────┐     ┌─────────┐
│  Claude  │────>│ Reviewer  │────>│  Claude  │
│  (code)  │     │ (Codex)   │     │  (fix)   │
└─────────┘     └──────────┘     └─────────┘
     ^                                 │
     │         ┌──────────┐            │
     └─────────│ Reviewer  │<───────────┘
               │(re-review)│
               └──────────┘
                    │
              VERDICT: APPROVED

Three modes

Mode is auto-detected from context, or you can force it with an argument.

Quick start

1. Prerequisites

Claude Code and OpenAI Codex CLI must be installed.

Verify both are available:

claude --version   # Claude Code CLI
codex --version    # OpenAI Codex CLI (>= 0.115.0)

If Codex is missing: npm install -g @openai/codex

Authentication. Codex needs an OpenAI account. Either:

• Sign in interactively: codex (opens browser)
• Or set CODEX_API_KEY env var for non-interactive use