Can Cursor's HARDCORE Review Skill Stop The Slop?

YouTube · YouTube

• Live test of a “thermonuclear code quality review” skill for Cursor: a strict automated review prompt that demands structural improvements, enforces file size limits, challenges spaghetti code, and insists on type boundary cleanliness.
• Run against Matt’s Sandcastle project: roughly 5 of 7 suggestions were genuinely useful — ambitious review prompts produce more false positives but surface real issues that would otherwise go unmissed.
• Notable gaps in the skill: no focus on testing or seams; the prompt itself is repetitive and could be condensed. Matt treats this as a useful baseline but not a complete quality gate.
• Practical takeaway: ambitious review prompts with a high bar catch real structural problems at the cost of noise — treat them as a first-pass signal generator, not an authoritative quality verdict.