Local Review

buddy review reviews your changes before you push them. With no pull request number it reads the working tree, so there is nothing to open and nothing to wait for.

buddy review

What gets reviewed

The default includes staged changes deliberately: a pre-commit review that ignored what you just staged would miss the very changes you are about to commit.

Without an API key

--light runs the analyzers and skips the model entirely — secret scanning, workflow auditing, YAML/JSON validation, and whatever linters the machine has installed. It needs no key and no network, which makes it usable in a pre-commit hook:

buddy review --staged --light --fail-on major

--fail-on <severity> exits non-zero when something at or above that severity is found, so the hook blocks the commit.

A full review adds the model's findings to the analyzers', so one command reports everything rather than you running two and merging them by hand.

Output formats

buddy review --format json     # machine-readable
buddy review --format github   # ::error annotations for Actions
buddy review --format agent    # a prompt block for a coding agent

Every format except pretty owns stdout completely — diagnostics are suppressed — so the output can be piped without a log line landing in the middle of a JSON document.

Piping to an agent

--format agent emits an instruction rather than a report:

buddy review --format agent | claude

The block tells the agent to change only what each finding asks for, and explicitly gives it permission to disagree and leave the code alone — an agent that mechanically applies a wrong finding is worse than one that pushes back.

Applying suggestions

buddy review --fix          # confirm each suggestion
buddy review --fix --yes    # apply without asking

Findings are applied bottom-up within each file, so replacing one line cannot shift the line numbers of the ones still to be applied. A suggestion whose line no longer matches — because the file changed since the review — is skipped rather than written, since applying it would corrupt an unrelated line.

Confirmation is per finding by default. A suggestion is a proposal; applying a batch unseen is how a review turns into an unreviewed commit.

Reviewing a pull request

Pass a number to review a PR and post the result:

buddy review 42
buddy review 42 --dry-run    # print it instead of posting

This needs a token; local review does not.

Diagnosing setup

buddy doctor

Reports credentials, git state, configuration validity and which analyzer tools are installed. Every problem it finds comes with the command or setting that fixes it.

Missing credentials and missing analyzer binaries are warnings, not failures — dependency updates and static analysis both work without them. doctor exits non-zero only when something is genuinely broken.