Solo dev makes /code-review an unskippable delivery gate

The author runs contract projects entirely alone — writing the code and reviewing it himself — and describes the failure mode he feared as shipping code he only believed he had reviewed. His earlier countermeasure was simply "being careful", which he says failed because care is not a system, and it broke first during busy periods.

What he changed was the shape of the workflow rather than the tool's raw capability. Reviews run non-interactively with write permission withheld, results are written to a file so a record exists even when nothing is flagged, and a high-severity finding stops delivery instead of merely sending a Slack notice. He separates the two roles explicitly: the AI review holds the authority to block a delivery but not the authority to approve one, and spec conformance, client explanations and the decision to apply fixes stay with him.

The stakes he identifies hinge on that division. He flags a dangerous side effect — starting to assume that a passing review means the code is fine — and counters it by putting "spec check is separate" into every notification. Whether the setup holds up appears to depend less on the tool's accuracy than on his keeping the human side of the split, since the one bug among three that it missed was a spec misunderstanding.