Weekend dev builds Claude Code skills to beat CodeRabbit limits

The author's context is a split working life: he uses AI tools largely without worrying about volume at his day job, but pays for his own hobby development, holding the Pro plan for Claude (including Claude Code) and the Essential plan for CodeRabbit. That asymmetry is what shaped the design. When weekend batch sessions kept hitting CodeRabbit's review cap, he turned the constraint into /coderabbit-queue rather than upgrading — roughly every 70 minutes, one request goes out, and if the service replies that the limit was reached, the skill waits and retries, using the service's own stated wait time when it gives one. The everyday checks then accumulate into the same pattern: Opus for regular work and Fable for reviewing high-impact changes, while log reading runs on a lighter model to stay inside the Pro plan's ceiling.

Several habits came directly from mistakes, according to the account. After CodeRabbit reviewed a commit and the pull request was then changed, the display read "reviewed" while the newest changes had not been seen; he nearly read an old review as "no findings, OK," so skills now verify that the reviewed commit ID matches the latest one. A log analysis once read timestamps shifted by nine hours from confusing Japan time with UTC, and log-analyzer has specified UTC ever since. He describes /script-check as growing one check at a time from pitfalls he actually hit, such as writing a full-width character right after a shell variable and having it read as part of the variable name.

The division of labour is the piece he says changed the most. Inquiry and preparation move fast in Claude's hands, while "merge now" and "ship to production now" stay his calls; the approval table, keyed to a 40-character commit ID (SHA), exists so that a merge fails if anything changed after his sign-off. He notes that because this is self-funded development, he does not use GitHub's paid features such as branch protection, so the double safety net is his way of covering what the plans do not.