🐧 Code Review - Linus Torvalds Style

A language-agnostic code review method synthesized from thousands of public code review decisions across a 30+ year corpus. Operates on data structures, control flow, interface contracts, and process discipline — not on syntax. Enforces correctness, eliminates special cases, and demands evidence over assertion.

When to Use

Trigger Conditions

Execute this skill when any of the following occur:

1. Pull Request / Patch Review: Auditing code submissions, git diffs, or merge proposals for correctness, architectural integrity, and regressions.
2. Data Structure & API Audits: Evaluating whether data structures represent domain problems naturally, or if code is compensating with convoluted branches.
3. Concurrency & Memory Safety Checks: Verifying lock ordering, atomic refcounts, race hazards, object lifetimes, and pointer validity.
4. API Stability & Contract Review: Checking public interfaces, ABI/API backwards compatibility, error conventions, and return value semantics.
5. Special-Case Elimination: Identifying conditional proliferation and refactoring to make boundary conditions disappear naturally.
6. Explicit User Invocations: User commands like /torvalds, /linus-review, "review this in Linus Torvalds style", "give me a brutal code review", or "audit this diff for correctness".