12 Project Docs

Project Documentation Context

nitpik automatically detects documentation files in your repository and includes them in the review prompt, so the LLM understands your team's conventions, architecture, and coding standards.

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How It Works

Before each review, nitpik scans your repo root for well-known documentation files and includes their content in the prompt alongside the diff and file content. This gives the LLM context about your team's expectations — naming conventions, error handling patterns, architectural decisions — so findings align with how your team actually works.

Priority Files: REVIEW.md and NITPIK.md

If a REVIEW.md or NITPIK.md file exists in your repo root, nitpik uses only those files as review context and skips the generic doc list entirely.

Think of REVIEW.md as an AGENTS.md for nitpik — a focused file that tells the reviewer exactly what your team cares about, without the noise of general contributor docs.

Both files can coexist — if both are present, both are included.

Writing an Effective REVIEW.md

Keep it focused on what matters for code review. A good REVIEW.md is short and specific:

# Review Guidelines

## Error Handling
- Use `anyhow::Result` in CLI code, `thiserror` enums in library modules.
- No `.unwrap()` outside tests.

## Naming
- `snake_case` for functions, `PascalCase` for types.
- Prefix boolean variables with `is_` or `has_`.

## Performance
- All database queries must use parameterized statements.
- Avoid allocations in hot loops — prefer iterators.

## What We Don't Care About
- Import ordering (handled by rustfmt).
- Line length (handled by clippy).

Don't duplicate your entire CONTRIBUTING.md here — focus on the conventions that a code reviewer should enforce.

Fallback Documentation

When no REVIEW.md or NITPIK.md is found, nitpik falls back to scanning for these common documentation files:

• AGENTS.md
• ARCHITECTURE.md
• CONVENTIONS.md
• CONTRIBUTING.md
• CLAUDE.md
• .github/copilot-instructions.md
• .cursorrules
• CODING_GUIDELINES.md
• STYLE_GUIDE.md
• DEVELOPMENT.md

Files larger than 256 KB are skipped to keep prompt size manageable.

Controlling Project Docs

Skip All Documentation

Suppress all auto-detected project docs:

nitpik review --diff-base main --no-project-docs

This reduces prompt size and token cost, but the LLM won't know about your team's conventions. Useful for quick one-off reviews or when testing.

Exclude Specific Files

Keep most docs but exclude noisy ones:

nitpik review --diff-base main --exclude-doc AGENTS.md
nitpik review --diff-base main --exclude-doc AGENTS.md,CONTRIBUTING.md

Note: Excluding all priority files (e.g. --exclude-doc REVIEW.md,NITPIK.md) causes nitpik to fall back to the generic doc list.

Related Pages

• How Reviews Work — where project docs fit in the prompt
• Custom Profiles — profile-level conventions
• Configuration — --no-project-docs and --exclude-doc flags