Session Isolation for Reviews

When Claude generates code and then reviews it in the same session, the review is compromised. The model still holds its own reasoning in context, so it tends to defend its choices instead of challenging them.

This is the same-session self-review anti-pattern. The author retains the rationale for every decision and rarely flags its own assumptions as suspect.

The exam principle is blunt: independent, fresh-instance review beats same-session self-review. In CI/CD, that means the reviewer should never share context with the generator.

A reviewer that starts from a blank context window approaches the diff like an outsider. It has no investment in why a function was written a certain way, so it evaluates the code on its merits alone.

• Generation context = the prompts, exploration, and reasoning that produced the code.
• Review context = just the code, the standards, and the review criteria.

Keeping these separate removes the confirmation bias that makes a self-review wave its own work through. Session isolation is the mechanism that enforces this separation in a pipeline.