Council Review Aura

Phase 8: Emit Council Checkpoint (auto)

Purpose. When this skill runs inside an Aura Companion Council pair, this phase tells the observer half "the orchestrator just finished reviewing — here is the review file, cross-check it." The observer wakes within ~1 second of the checkpoint POST and emits its independent review to <workspace>/.council/reviews/council-review-<provider>-observer.md. Without this step the council loop never closes — the observer remains in "Awaiting first checkpoint" forever.

The value: the orchestrator-run council review and the observer-run independent review come from different model contexts. Disagreement between them is itself signal.

Skip this phase entirely if any of these are true:

• http://localhost:3456/api/sessions does not respond (you are not inside the Aura Companion UI).
• No session in the response matches the current workspace + orchestrator role.
• The POST .../council/checkpoint returns 409 — that response IS the silent-skip signal.

Steps

1. Probe the API. Run curl -fsS http://localhost:3456/api/sessions. Non-zero exit or empty → skip the entire phase.

2. Discover the orchestrator session id. Filter the response array for the entry matching ALL of:

   • state == "connected"
   • cwd == <current workspace cwd> (the cwd you reviewed under)
   • sessionGroupRole == "orchestrator"
   • newest createdAt if more than one match

   Zero matches → silent skip. One match → capture sessionId (= ORCH_SID) and sessionGroupId (= GROUP_ID).

3. Compute next sequence. List <workspace>/.council/checkpoints/*.json. Read each file's sequence field. next_sequence = max(...) + 1, or 0 if the directory is empty or absent.

4. Build CheckpointPayload.

   {
     "schema_version": 1,
     "checkpoint_id": "council-review-<seq>-<8-hex-random>",
     "phase": "council-review",
     "sequence": <next_sequence>,
     "session_group_id": "<GROUP_ID>",
     "emitted_at": "<UTC ISO 8601 T-form, no fractional seconds>",
     "artifact_paths": [".council/review-output/<TIMESTAMP>/FINAL-REVIEW.md"]
   }
   

   artifact_paths should be the single FINAL-REVIEW.md path from Phase 5, workspace-relative. The observer's job here is meta-review — does the orchestrator's review hold up?

5. POST. Use the Bash tool:

   curl -fsS -X POST \
     "http://localhost:3456/api/sessions/$ORCH_SID/council/checkpoint" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d "$PAYLOAD"
   

   Expected 200 with {"ok": true, "written": "...", ...}.

6. On non-200:

   • 409 ("Session is not part of an active council group"): silent skip, not an error.
   • 400 / 403 / 500: surface the raw response body to the user, do not retry.

7. Do not wait for the observer's review. The 200 response IS the success signal for this phase; the observer's review lands asynchronously in the Aura UI's ObserverPanel.