Code Review - Claude Code Docs

Code Review analyzes your GitHub pull requests and posts findings as inline comments on the lines of code where it found issues. A fleet of specialized agents examine the code changes in the context of your full codebase, looking for logic errors, security vulnerabilities, broken edge cases, and subtle regressions. Findings are tagged by severity and don’t approve or block your PR, so existing review workflows stay intact. You can tune what Claude flags by adding a CLAUDE.md or REVIEW.md file to your repository. To run Claude in your own CI infrastructure instead of this managed service, see GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. This page covers:

• How reviews work
• Setup
• Customizing reviews with CLAUDE.md and REVIEW.md
• Pricing

How reviews work

Once an admin enables Code Review for your organization, reviews trigger when a PR opens, on every push, or when manually requested, depending on the repository’s configured behavior. Commenting @claude review starts reviews on a PR in any mode. When a review runs, multiple agents analyze the diff and surrounding code in parallel on Anthropic infrastructure. Each agent looks for a different class of issue, then a verification step checks candidates against actual code behavior to filter out false positives. The results are deduplicated, ranked by severity, and posted as inline comments on the specific lines where issues were found. If no issues are found, Claude posts a short confirmation comment on the PR. Reviews scale in cost with PR size and complexity, completing in 20 minutes on average. Admins can monitor review activity and spend via the analytics dashboard.

Severity levels

Each finding is tagged with a severity level:

Findings include a collapsible extended reasoning section you can expand to understand why Claude flagged the issue and how it verified the problem.

What Code Review checks

By default, Code Review focuses on correctness: bugs that would break production, not formatting preferences or missing test coverage. You can expand what it checks by adding guidance files to your repository.

Set up Code Review

An admin enables Code Review once for the organization and selects which repositories to include.

The repositories table also shows the average cost per review for each repo based on recent activity. Use the row actions menu to turn Code Review on or off per repository, or to remove a repository entirely. To verify setup, open a test PR. If you chose an automatic trigger, a check run named Claude Code Review appears within a few minutes. If you chose Manual, comment @claude review on the PR to start the first review. If no check run appears, confirm the repository is listed in your admin settings and the Claude GitHub App has access to it.

Manually trigger reviews

Comment @claude review on a pull request to start a review and opt that PR into push-triggered reviews going forward. This works regardless of the repository’s configured trigger: use it to opt specific PRs into review in Manual mode, or to get an immediate re-review in other modes. Either way, pushes to that PR trigger reviews from then on. For the comment to trigger a review:

• Post it as a top-level PR comment, not an inline comment on a diff line
• Put @claude review at the start of the comment
• You must have owner, member, or collaborator access to the repository
• The PR must be open and not a draft

If a review is already running on that PR, the request is queued until the in-progress review completes. You can monitor progress via the check run on the PR.

Customize reviews

Code Review reads two files from your repository to guide what it flags. Both are additive on top of the default correctness checks:

• CLAUDE.md: shared project instructions that Claude Code uses for all tasks, not just reviews. Use it when guidance also applies to interactive Claude Code sessions.
• REVIEW.md: review-only guidance, read exclusively during code reviews. Use it for rules that are strictly about what to flag or skip during review and would clutter your general CLAUDE.md.

CLAUDE.md

Code Review reads your repository’s CLAUDE.md files and treats newly-introduced violations as nit-level findings. This works bidirectionally: if your PR changes code in a way that makes a CLAUDE.md statement outdated, Claude flags that the docs need updating too. Claude reads CLAUDE.md files at every level of your directory hierarchy, so rules in a subdirectory’s CLAUDE.md apply only to files under that path. See the memory documentation for more on how CLAUDE.md works. For review-specific guidance that you don’t want applied to general Claude Code sessions, use REVIEW.md instead.

REVIEW.md

Add a REVIEW.md file to your repository root for review-specific rules. Use it to encode:

• Company or team style guidelines: “prefer early returns over nested conditionals”
• Language- or framework-specific conventions not covered by linters
• Things Claude should always flag: “any new API route must have an integration test”
• Things Claude should skip: “don’t comment on formatting in generated code under /gen/”

Example REVIEW.md:

# Code Review Guidelines

## Always check
- New API endpoints have corresponding integration tests
- Database migrations are backward-compatible
- Error messages don't leak internal details to users

## Style
- Prefer `match` statements over chained `isinstance` checks
- Use structured logging, not f-string interpolation in log calls

## Skip
- Generated files under `src/gen/`
- Formatting-only changes in `*.lock` files

Claude auto-discovers REVIEW.md at the repository root. No configuration needed.

View usage

Go to claude.ai/analytics/code-review to see Code Review activity across your organization. The dashboard shows:

The repositories table in admin settings also shows average cost per review for each repo.

Pricing

Code Review is billed based on token usage. Each review averages $15-25 in cost, scaling with PR size, codebase complexity, and how many issues require verification. Code Review usage is billed separately through extra usage and does not count against your plan’s included usage. The review trigger you choose affects total cost:

• Once after PR creation: runs once per PR
• After every push: runs on each push, multiplying cost by the number of pushes
• Manual: no reviews until someone comments @claude review on a PR

In any mode, commenting @claude review opts the PR into push-triggered reviews, so additional cost accrues per push after that comment. Costs appear on your Anthropic bill regardless of whether your organization uses AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex AI for other Claude Code features. To set a monthly spend cap for Code Review, go to claude.ai/admin-settings/usage and configure the limit for the Claude Code Review service. Monitor spend via the weekly cost chart in analytics or the per-repo average cost column in admin settings.

Code Review is designed to work alongside the rest of Claude Code. If you want to run reviews locally before opening a PR, need a self-hosted setup, or want to go deeper on how CLAUDE.md shapes Claude’s behavior across tools, these pages are good next stops:

• Plugins: browse the plugin marketplace, including a code-review plugin for running on-demand reviews locally before pushing
• GitHub Actions: run Claude in your own GitHub Actions workflows for custom automation beyond code review
• GitLab CI/CD: self-hosted Claude integration for GitLab pipelines
• Memory: how CLAUDE.md files work across Claude Code
• Analytics: track Claude Code usage beyond code review