Review-and-Fix Loops: The Cold Critic, the Fixer, and the Gate Before Full Autonomy

A code reviewer who wrote the code is the worst possible reviewer, so wire a cold-context critic against an Edit-capable fixer and an objective test gate. The one pitfall that breaks it: a fixer that games the gate by rewriting the tests instead of the bug. Episode page & show notes Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code Act II of the agentic coding ladder: the trust rung. We build a review-and-fix loop where one agent critiques a diff while another repairs it, with a human still approving the result. This is wired entirely out of primitives from earlier episodes: subagents, skills, slash commands, hooks, the orchestrator pattern, headless mode, the Agent SDK, git worktrees, and the @claude GitHub Action. The core idea: a reviewer who wrote the code is the worst reviewer. You want a generator, then a critic in a fresh cold context, then a fixer, then an objective gate. Concepts and sources: Building Effective Agents (evaluator-optimizer, iteration caps) Reflexion and Self-Refine LLMs Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet (intrinsic self-correction degrades without an external anchor) Multi-agent research system (verify high-stakes outputs with a separate pass) Building it in Claude Code today: Custom subagents in the agents folder under dot-claude Code Review and security-review ultrareview cloud fleet Headless mode with json-schema findings Agent SDK for the multi-round loop GitHub Actions for the hosted version The pitfall: the fixer reward-hacks the test gate, documented in ImpossibleBench and EvilGenie. Bound it with tool separation, immutable tests, and a PreToolUse hook. News: Claude Fable 5 lands in Claude Code via v2.1.170, plus v2.1.169 safe mode and the /cd command.