Canonical Review

by rsmdt

Canonical Review is a Quality skill for Claude Code, published by rsmdt in the-startup.

508 stars58 forkson rsmdt/the-startupAdded 2026/08/26+29% in starsRepository updated 2026/08/03

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claude-codeclaude-code-pluginclaude-marketplaceclaude-plugin

Install in seconds

Install Canonical Review

Copy Canonical Review into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/rsmdt/the-startup/tree/main/plugins/start/skills/writing-skills/examples ~/.claude/skills/examples

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/rsmdt/the-startup.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: plugins/start/skills/writing-skills/examples/canonical-skill.md in rsmdt/the-startup
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/examples
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Quality — 1354 skills

What Canonical Review does

Canonical Review orchestrates multi-agent code review with specialist perspectives and structured findings. Use it to review a PR, branch, staged changes, or files and synthesize actionable issues.

Canonical Review is cataloged under Quality on DirSkills. Canonical Review comes from a repository tagged claude-code, claude-code-plugin, claude-marketplace and claude-plugin.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Canonical Skill Example: review

A complete skill demonstrating all gold-standard conventions, annotated with convention callouts.

---
name: review                          # kebab-case, matches skill directory name
description: Multi-agent code review  # trigger-focused, no workflow details
  with specialized perspectives
user-invocable: true
argument-hint: "PR number, branch     # shown in / menu
  name, file path, or 'staged'"
---
# Note: allowed-tools is deprecated — tools are available by default

Persona

Act as a code review orchestrator...

Review Target: $ARGUMENTS

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Canonical Review

What else does rsmdt publish alongside Canonical Review?
Canonical Review is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from rsmdt/the-startup, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Analyze, Brainstorm and Constitution. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Canonical Review does, and is maintained by rsmdt in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the rsmdt/the-startup page.
How does Canonical Review compare to other Quality skills?
Canonical Review ranks #1206 by stars among the 1354 Quality skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Benchmark, Benchmark Optimization Loop and API Design Patterns. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Canonical Review against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.