Decide what each state means
A list of findings is not a plan. Teams need a shared understanding of what happens after a warning appears. Otherwise, one person uses accepted to mean worth investigating, another means fixed, and a third assumes it means approved for release. The dashboard looks organized while the actual work remains ambiguous.
Give each decision a narrow meaning. Open means that you have not finished evaluating the claim. Accepted means that you consider it relevant and worth acting on. Dismissed means that you have decided it does not require action for this change. Implementation and verification should be tracked through the actual code change and review process.
Confirm relevance before assigning urgency
Read the finding in the context of the current pull request. Check that its cited code still exists, that the described input can reach it, and that the consequence conflicts with the intended behavior. A warning may be accurate for a previous revision but irrelevant after a guard was added.
Then assess urgency using the concrete impact and exposure. A dramatic category name does not supply those facts. An authorization failure affecting another customer's records needs a different response from an unnecessary allocation in a rarely executed maintenance command. Both deserve a clear decision; they do not automatically deserve the same priority.
Keep a short decision record
When a finding needs discussion, record the reasoning in the team's normal issue or pull-request conversation. Link the exact revision and explain the relevant trigger. If you dismiss it, state which guard prevents the problem or which requirement makes the behavior intentional. This turns a future repeat warning into something another reviewer can evaluate.
Use a compact template outside the finding list when the decision matters. The point is to preserve evidence, not to generate paperwork. A few precise lines are often enough to distinguish a false positive from accepted risk or a deferred fix. Avoid copying sensitive values from source code into discussion or screenshots.
- Finding and revision: what exactly was reviewed?
- Decision: accepted, dismissed, or still investigating?
- Reason: what code or requirement supports that decision?
- Next action: who will implement or verify any necessary change?
Verify the fix on a fresh review
After a fix lands in the pull request, sync the repository and review the current revision. Check the behavior that originally justified the finding. The disappearance of a warning can be useful evidence, but it is not sufficient by itself: a changed pattern, ignored path, or display filter may also remove it from view.
AntiCode preserves personal triage for unchanged findings across reruns. Use that continuity to avoid repeating the same investigation, while remaining willing to reconsider a decision when the code changes. A healthy triage process reduces repeated work because the reasoning is clear, not because every warning has been moved out of the open column.
Further reading
Put it into practice
Start with a small change you are authorized to review. Follow the AntiCode setup guide, inspect each finding, and keep your tests and human approval in the loop.