06 Reviewer Profiles

Reviewer Profiles & Lenses

nitpik reviews a diff through lenses — issue-typed specialist reviewers, each hunting one orthogonal class of problem (correctness, security, concurrency, …). Several run in parallel and their findings are merged, deduplicated, and verified.

By default nitpik runs --profile auto: two always-on lenses plus the conditional lenses a triage step judges the change actually warrants. Pass --profile <name> to run an exact set instead.

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How the default review works

Every default review runs the two always-on lenses:

Lens	Hunts for
security	injection, authZ, secrets, input validation, crypto, cross-tenant isolation
correctness	logic bugs, off-by-one, error handling, edge cases, invariant/state-machine violations

On top of those, a fast triage step selects from the conditional lenses — only the ones whose failure mode the change plausibly contains:

Lens	Hunts for	Scope
concurrency	races, deadlocks, shared mutable state, ordering	per file
performance	N+1 queries, hot-path allocation, complexity, latency	per file
test-integrity	coverage of changed behavior, determinism, tautological tests	per file
operational	observability, migrations (fwd+rollback), feature flags, config/secrets	per file
a11y	semantics, ARIA, keyboard nav/focus, contrast, labels	per file
user-journey	UX happy-path + failure-mode walkthrough	per file
contract-impact	rename/remove/signature ripple to call sites; cross-file API/back-compat	whole diff
docs-drift	docs/comments/OpenAPI/changelog no longer matching changed behavior	whole diff
holistic	whole-PR coherence; symmetric obligations (rollback-for-migration)	whole diff

It is normal for triage to pick no conditional lens on a small, self-contained change — the always-on lenses already cover it. The three whole-diff lenses (contract-impact, docs-drift, holistic) review the entire change set at once and use repository-exploration tools by default (see Agentic Mode).

Auto-Selection

When --profile is omitted, nitpik runs auto. You can request it explicitly:

nitpik review --diff-base main --profile auto

The always-on lenses always run. The conditional lenses are chosen by --auto-mode:

Mode	Behavior
heuristic	File/path rules only — no LLM call. Maps frontend files → a11y/user-journey, tests → test-integrity, structural/large diffs → operational/contract-impact/holistic, docs → docs-drift. Fully offline.
llm	Always ask the model to pick conditional lenses by substance, using the built-in triage prompt.
hybrid (default)	Consults the LLM for substance-based selection on every run; falls back to the heuristic if the triage call can't run or fails.

Triage is a cheap call — point it at a smaller model with [provider.models] triage or NITPIK_TRIAGE_MODEL (see Providers).

Explicit selection

--profile <names> runs exactly what you name — the always-on lenses are not added on top. This keeps explicit selection predictable (and is the power-user/CI path), but note that --profile my-lens alone runs without the security net; add it back with --profile my-lens,security,correctness.

nitpik review --diff-base main --profile security,correctness,concurrency

When multiple lenses run together, each is told what the others cover so they stay in their lane and avoid duplicate findings. See How Reviews Work.

Upgrading from 2.x? The domain profiles backend, frontend, architect, and general were removed in 3.0. Use the issue-typed lenses above instead — for most setups the default auto is the direct replacement. Custom profiles you ship in --profile-dir are unaffected.

Tag-Based Selection

Select profiles by tag instead of name; matching is case-insensitive and spans built-in lenses and custom profiles:

nitpik review --diff-base main --tag accessibility
nitpik review --diff-base main --tag performance,concurrency

Combine --tag with --profile to add tag-matched reviewers on top of an explicit set.

Always-on and custom profiles

security and correctness set always_include: true, which is why they run on every default review. Any custom profile in your --profile-dir with the same flag rides along too; a custom profile that sets auto_candidate: true joins the conditional triage pool. See Custom Profiles.

Listing Profiles

nitpik profiles
nitpik profiles --profile-dir ./agents

Shows each profile's name, description, and tags.

Related Pages

• Custom Profiles — create your own reviewers
• How Reviews Work — multi-agent coordination
• Agentic Mode — --agent policy and tool access
• CLI Reference — all profile-related flags