I built a VSCode extension that reviews your code like a senior engineer — here's what I learned

Kshitij Sawant — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:08:20 +0000

What It Does

You make some changes, open the GhostReview sidebar, pick a persona, and click Review. That is it.

Three reviewer personas:

💀 Brutal Architect — tears apart your architectural decisions with no sugar-coating
⚡ Startup Velocity — categorizes issues as BLOCKING, BEFORE NEXT SPRINT, or NICE TO HAVE
🔒 Security Paranoid — finds vulnerabilities and rates them Critical, High, Medium, or Low

First 5 reviews are completely free. No API key. No signup. Just install and run.

The Honest Feedback I Got

When I first posted on Reddit, someone called it "AI slop." And honestly — they were not completely wrong about v1.

The first version was a generic diff reviewer. You could get the same result by pasting your code into ChatGPT. There was nothing that made it worth installing specifically.

That feedback hurt but it was the most useful thing anyone said. It forced me to ask — what would make GhostReview worth using over just asking an AI directly?

The answer was memory. No AI tool remembers your previous mistakes. GhostReview can — because it saves every review to a personal dashboard.

That is the real product. Not just "AI reviews your code." But "AI that remembers what you keep getting wrong."

The Technical Stack

Layer	Technology
Extension	TypeScript + VSCode Extension API
AI	Groq API — llama-3.3-70b-versatile
Dashboard	Next.js 15 App Router
Database	Supabase + Row Level Security
Auth	GitHub OAuth
Security	AES-256-GCM encryption at rest

The part I am most proud of — user Groq API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before being stored in the database. The encryption secret lives separately in Vercel environment variables. Even if the database was compromised, the keys would be useless without the secret. Defence in depth.

The Honest Numbers

118 installs in 90 days with zero marketing.

The extension shows up organically when people search for AI code review tools on the VSCode marketplace.

But almost nobody was actually using it after installing. They would see the Groq API key requirement and leave. Classic activation problem.

Shipping a free tier fixed this. Now the first experience is:

Install the extension
Open the sidebar
Click Review

No setup. No API key. No account. Just feedback.

What Is Next

Pattern Detection.

GhostReview will analyze your review history and surface recurring mistakes across all your past reviews.

"You have had async error handling flagged 8 times this month."

CodeRabbit reviews your team's PRs. GhostReview tracks
your personal growth as an individual developer.

The difference is the focus. CodeRabbit is built for teams
and code quality.

GhostReview starts with the individual developer —
tracking your personal mistake history as you code.
The roadmap goes further: team-level pattern detection
for engineering managers who want visibility into
how their junior developers are actually growing.

Bottom-up adoption. One developer at a time.

That is the real answer to "AI slop" — it is not just another wrapper. It is a growth tracker disguised as a code reviewer.

Try It

🔌 VSCode Marketplace → Install GhostReview
📊 Dashboard → Open Dashboard
🌐 Landing page → ghostreview

Feedback welcome — especially if you think it is still AI slop. I want to hear it.