Every Commit in My Repo Gets Reviewed by a Second AI. Here's What Actually Changed.

My CLAUDE.md has one line near the bottom that I wrote months ago and mostly forgot about until I started actually paying attention to what it does: ## Important Note after your work done codex will review what you done. Terse, no punctuation, clearly typed in a hurry. But it's a real instruction that fires on every session in this repo: I finish a change, and a second model reviews it before I consider the work done. I added it half as an experiment. A few months in, it's changed how I work more than almost anything else in the setup, and not in the way I expected. I thought it would catch bugs. Mostly it doesn't, not directly. What it actually does is force a triage decision on every single piece of feedback, and getting that triage wrong is where all the pain lives. The three buckets Early on I treated every review comment the same way: read it, do it. That lasted about a week before I was silently making changes I didn't agree with because a second AI suggested them, and separately burning a stupid amount of time re-litigating comments that were just wrong or out of scope. What actually works is sorting every comment into one of three buckets before touching code: Fix it, no discussion. The comment is unambiguous, low-risk, and doesn't touch anything architecturally significant. Just do it and move on. Ask first. The comment is ambiguous, or it touches something that would require a real judgment call, or the "fix" would be a bigger refactor than the comment implies. Stop and get a human decision before acting. Skip silently. The comment is a duplicate of something already handled, or genuinely doesn't apply. Don't reply just to say "not doing this," don't leave a comment thread as evidence of having read it. Silence is the correct response to a non-issue. The failure mode I kept falling into before I had these buckets explicitly was collapsing 2 into 1: treating "ambiguous" as "just pick an interpretation and go." That's the actual source of review fatigue, not