7 prompts that turn your AI from a yes-man into a real code reviewer

Ask an AI "is this code good?" and you'll get "Looks good! A few minor suggestions..." almost every time. That's not a review. That's politeness.

The model isn't lying. You asked a yes/no question with a friendly tone, and it gave you a friendly yes. Change the question and you get a different tool. Here are seven prompts I use every day.

What are the 3 most likely ways this code breaks in production? Rank them by impact and give a fix for each.

This forces the model to look for failure modes instead of confirming your work. Ranking by impact stops it from burying the one real bug under five style nits.

Most "the AI gave me wrong code" complaints come from missing context. Before asking, paste:

Before writing any code, list the files you'd change and why. Wait for my OK.

A wrong plan is cheap to fix. A wrong 200-line diff is not.

Explain this diff line by line. Point out anything you're unsure about.

If the model can't explain a change clearly, the change is probably wrong. This catches hallucinated APIs fast.

Review this as a senior engineer who has been paged at 3 a.m. by this service twice this month.

Sounds silly, works well. It shifts the review from style to reliability: timeouts, retries, logging, error handling.

Could you maybe help me write a migration for this table?

Write a migration that adds a nullable archived_at timestamp to orders. Output only the SQL.

The second one gets you working output on the first try. Hedged prompts get hedged answers.

After a long session the model mixes up old decisions and repeats itself. Don't fight it. Open a new chat and paste a five-line summary:

Fresh context beats a long, polluted one every time.

What's your go-to review prompt? Drop it in the comments. I'm collecting the good ones.

Disclosure: I work on MadGPT, an AI workspace with 7 models and a VS Code agent. The prompts above work with any assistant. This article was drafted with AI assistance and edited by a human.

Expand Alex Shev Alex Shev Alex Shev Follow Creator of Terminal Skills — curated terminal skills, CLI tools, and practical workflows for modern developers. Location Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas Work Founder at SEOG & Terminal Skills Joined Mar 7, 2026 • Nov 4 Dropdown menu Copy link Hide The prompts are a good starting point, but a reviewer becomes useful when it can anchor objections to evidence. Asking it to name the affected invariant, point to the smallest reproducer, and state what would disprove its concern helps turn critique from confident prose into a review someone can act on.