CCA-F: Claude Certified Architect — Foundations

Question

You are integrating Claude Code into your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. The system performs automated code reviews, generates test cases, and provides pull-request feedback. You must design prompts that deliver actionable feedback while minimizing false positives.

Your pipeline runs:

PROMPT="You are a code reviewer."  
PROMPT="$PROMPT Analyze the provided diff"  
PROMPT="$PROMPT for bugs, security issues,"  
PROMPT="$PROMPT and style violations." claude -p \ -- dangerously-skip-permissions \ --system-prompt "$PROMPT" \ &lt; diff.txt

The reviews finish and return feedback, but Claude comments only on the diff text piped in—it never reads surrounding files in the checked-out repository to gain broader context, even when the diff changes a function called by many other modules.

Which invocation change will make Claude read related repository files while still applying your custom review instructions?

Explanation

--append-system-prompt adds custom instructions to Claude Code’s default system prompt, whereas --system-prompt replaces it. Retaining the default prompt preserves Claude Code’s built-in guidance for using file-reading and code-navigation tools, allowing repository context to be examined during the review. Anthropic documents both flags for print mode and distinguishes appending to the default system prompt from replacing it.

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CCA-F: Claude Certified Architect — Foundations

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