Prompt & Review Anti-Patterns

This lesson dissects two review anti-patterns that quietly drain quality from agentic code review: single-pass multi-file review and same-session self-review.

Both share one root cause: asking a single context to do too much at once. When you cram many files into one pass, attention gets diluted. When the same session that wrote the code also reviews it, the author keeps its own reasoning and won't challenge itself.

On the Claude Certified Architect exam (Scenario 5, CI/CD), these are classic distractors. Recognizing them — and knowing the correct structure — is worth real points.

Imagine handing the model 14 changed files and saying "review this PR." The model spreads finite attention across all of them simultaneously. Subtle per-file bugs get missed, and the cross-file story — how a renamed function ripples through its callers — is never examined deliberately.

Two mechanisms compound the failure:

• Attention dilution: more files in one pass means shallower scrutiny per file.
• Lost-in-the-middle: models attend most to the start and end of context, so files in the middle of a large dump get the least scrutiny.

The fix is not a bigger context window — it is better decomposition.