When a one-pass review beats a three-pass review
I built three perfection-pass commands. The expensive one isn't always the right call. Here's the budget I use.
The lineup
Three commands in my Claude Code setup, all do code refinement, in increasing cost:
/critique— single-pass 3-agent critique. ~$0.10. ~3 minutes./pp2p— two perfection passes plus polish. ~$0.40. ~10 minutes./pp3p— three perfection passes plus polish, includes Codex adversarial review. ~$1.20. ~25 minutes.
The temptation, every time, is to reach for /pp3p on everything. Don't.
When /critique is enough
- Drafts I'm going to revise myself anyway
- Internal-only scripts that don't ship to production
- Documentation
- Anything where the cost of a missed bug is "I fix it later"
/critique runs three agents in parallel — different angles, no cross-pollination. You get three perspectives in one read. Most code I write needs exactly that.
When /pp2p is the right call
- Features that touch the database
- Anything that crosses a trust boundary (API auth, file uploads, user input)
- Public-facing UI changes
- Anything I'd be embarrassed if a customer saw broken
The two-pass cycle catches what one pass misses. The polish pass catches what perfection misses. About 90% of "real" code I ship gets /pp2p.
When /pp3p earns its slot
- Auth code
- Payment code
- Database migrations on tables with real data
- Anything where the cost of a bug is "I can't undo this"
The third pass + Codex adversarial review catches the bugs the other passes missed because they were thinking like me. Codex thinks differently. That's the unlock.
The budget
Rough monthly spend on these passes: about $40. Bugs caught: probably $4,000 worth, if I count "embarrassment cost" plus "incident response time."
The trap is using /pp3p on something that should have been /critique. That's $1.10 wasted per use, plus 22 minutes of wall-clock time. Do it 30 times and you've burned a workday.
What you can steal
If you're using AI code review at all, build the cost ladder explicitly:
- Cheap pass for drafts and internal scripts
- Medium pass for production code
- Expensive adversarial pass for irreversible changes
Then DECIDE which tier each commit belongs to BEFORE you run the review. The discipline is in the assignment, not in the tool.
I get this wrong about once a week — reach for /pp3p on something that didn't need it. The fix is to slow down by 10 seconds and ask: "What's the cost of a bug here?" Then pick the tier that matches.