Joshua de Guzman
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Before you add @claude to your Flutter project

Before you add @claude to your Flutter project

I'll be honest with you—when I first heard about using Claude as an AI code reviewer, my immediate thought was: "Great, another shiny tool that promises to solve all our problems."

In the past, I've used Copilot for code reviews and played with CodeRabbit. However, I always find myself defaulting to Claude CLI to review my code. Most recently Gemini CLI for a much larger context and changes.

So, when the Claude GitHub App was announced, I had to give it a try.

What exactly is an AI agent reviewer?

Think of an AI agent reviewer as your assistant who never sleeps, never nitpicks, and has read every Flutter documentation page ever written, almost. Unlike traditional static analysis tools that follow rigid rules, AI agents like Claude can understand context that may change over time, recognize patterns, and even catch subtle architectural issues and improvements:

Example Code Review

The key difference? Context awareness. While your linter warns you about missing semicolons, Claude might notice that you're rebuilding widgets unnecessarily. And while your linter reports a failing test in your CI due to an unused import, Claude will report a potential runtime crash or security issues for your Flutter app:

Context Awareness

But, here's the thing. It's still an AI-generated response. I don't recommend to trust it 100% of the time. You have to discern if what Claude saying is correct or incorrect. Often, I use its feedback to rethink my approach to certain decisions and implementation details:

Forward Looking

The good and the bad

Where Claude shines

Pattern recognition: Claude excels at spotting common Flutter anti-patterns. It'll catch things like:

  • Unnecessary setState() calls that could cause performance issues
  • Widget compositions that could be simplified
  • Missing error handling in async operations
  • Accessibility oversights that human reviewers often miss

Educational feedback: Unlike traditional code review comments that just say "don't do this" or "fix this", Claude provides an explanation of why something should be changed.

Consistency enforcement: Claude is context-aware of your codebase and can be grounded in the structure or styles your team is following.

Where Claude stumbles

Business context: Claude doesn't fully understand your product roadmap, user feedback, or the business logic behind your decision. You need to provide it more context so that it stays grounded, but it's not guaranteed that it will know how your business works 100% of the time.

Performance nuances: While Claude understands how Flutter and Dart works under the hood to some degree, it can’t measure the real impact of its suggestions. Claude doesn’t know all the workarounds you have on other parts of the app that are not currently included in the codebase or code changes of a pull request.

Over-engineering tendency: Claude knows "the best practices", yes. But, these may not be applicable to what you need, the composition of your team, or the timeline you are operating on. Without Claude knowing all the context outside the codebase, it will not be able to offer a workaround or more grounded solutions.

Fine-tuning Claude for code reviews

Here's where most people go wrong when I read posts online. They plug Claude into a GitHub in and expect it will work out of the box. But like any team member, Claude needs proper onboarding.

Create a Flutter-Specific Context File

You need to create a CLAUDE.md file in your repo and provide the patterns and styles your team is following/using:

# Flutter Project Guidelines for Claude
 
## Our Stack
 
- State Management: Riverpod (with old code pieces of Provider, not BLoC and get_it)
- Architecture: MVVM with Repository pattern
- Testing: Unit tests required for business logic, widget tests for complex UIs
 
## What We Care About
 
- Performance over perfect code structure
- Accessibility is non-negotiable
- Keep it simple—we're not building the next Facebook
 
## What We Don't Want
 
- Suggestions to rewrite working code unless there's a clear benefit
- Over-engineering simple features
- Breaking changes without migration paths

Set realistic expectations

Don't expect Claude to catch everything. In my experience, it's good at:

  • Provide suggestions for what is considered "best practices"
  • Code quality and consistency
  • Common Flutter gotchas
  • Documentation gaps
  • Basic security issues

But it's not great at:

  • Complex business logic validation
  • Performance bottlenecks specific to your app
  • Integration issues with third-party services
  • Obscure, low-level APIs for build systems, particularly for iOS

When you may not need @claude

Claude, just like any other AI tool, is there to help improve your efficiency as a software engineer. However, you may not need Claude when you:

  • Prefer strict linter rules over AI suggestions
  • Have valid cost considerations
  • Want the AI code reviewer to be self-hosted (not available at the time of writing)

The bottom line

Adding Claude to your Flutter project as a code reviewer is not meant to replace human reviewers—it's about augmenting your team and being more efficient at what they do.

Will it catch every bug? Perhaps not. But it's there as a resource for anything that you or your team may have missed or can improve during code reviews.

The key is continuing to set realistic expectations for what Claude is good at and not good at, getting feedback from your team, and fine tuning Claude's context-awareness as you go.

Resources