/code-review medium now runs the high-effort recipe on most models
On every model without its own /code-review row, Opus 5.5 included, medium now runs the eight-angle high recipe instead of a single pass. high, xhigh and Opus 5 are unchanged.
You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
3Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
2Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
Code ReviewArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.290,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
/code-review (alias /review) picks a review recipe from a table keyed by model and effort level. Only claude-opus-5, claude-opus-4-8 and claude-sonnet-5 have their own row; every other model, Opus 5.5 included, reads the default row. In that row medium moved from the o5-bmin recipe to o48-high-v1, so it now runs the same recipe as high.
Details
o5-bmin, the old medium: one careful pass over the diff, up to 15 findings.
o48-high-v1, the new medium: eight finder angles run in the same context (line-by-line scan, removed behaviour, cross-file callers, cleanup, altitude, conventions), up to 6 candidates each, deduplicated with no verify step and biased toward recall, up to 10 findings unless --max-findings sets another limit.
low, high, xhigh and max are unchanged in the default row; high was already o48-high-v1 in 2.1.289.
The claude-opus-5 row still maps medium and high to o5-bmin. The Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 rows did not change.
This is not the session's /effort setting, and the model's reasoning effort does not change: both recipes pass the level you typed through as the effort.
Why
On Opus 5.5 or any other model without its own row, /code-review medium is now a longer review that surfaces more uncertain findings than it did in 2.1.289, and its default cap drops from 15 findings to 10.
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Confirmed sinceAnthropic's documentation has since written up /code-review, on Find bugs with ultrareview.PR mode needs a repository on `github.com`. For a repository on a [GitHub Enterprise Server](/docs/en/github-enterprise-server) instance, run `/code-review ultra` without a PR number to review your local branch instead.ultrareviewsee the edit
What has happened since
Corrected by handThe operator corrected this entry by hand after it was published.
Two sources agreeTwo things we can check say the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agreesAnthropic's documentation has since written up /code-review, on Find bugs with ultrareview.
Anthropic's release notes agreeChanged /code-review at medium effort to also report cleanup and CLAUDE.md conventions findings on models without tuned review settings…