Craft Verdict

Skill: Craft Verdict

"What can be said in one word must not take three."

Severity

A failing oracle blocks regardless. Two oracles disagreeing is a stop — escalate, don't pick one.

A Finding Is A Row

| Sev | Where | Issue | Change | Principle |
|-----|-------|-------|--------|-----------|
| C | craft-spec:30 | ":30 forbids self-run gates, :34 shows how | scope it to solo walks | Law 1 |

Where is file:line. Everything else is one clause.

Risk is not a column. Severity carries it — a Critical is "this breaks." Add one only when severity fails to convey it: "passes single-threaded, fails under load."

Principle is not optional. It is the only thing separating a verdict from taste.

Budget

Over ~40 lines is itself a finding. Candidate oracle: wc -l against a threshold.

Read The History First

Prior verdicts are input, not archive. Before forming a finding, read verdicts/:

• Raised 3 times → Promote candidate, not a fourth finding.
• Approved over 3 times → no longer residual. Raise the accumulation, not the instance.
• Already settled → don't re-raise unless it worsened.

Slop is invisible in one diff and obvious across forty. A judge that can't see forty can't see slop.

What The Convener Runs

That read answers recurrence. It cannot say which round you are on, and no judge can ask — the toolset is Read, Glob, Grep. So everything mechanical runs here, in the parent session, before a judge is spawned. The gates, and the chain:

# which round this review is on
sh "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/verdicts.sh" round <dir> <review>

# the record before it — exit 1 when nothing stamps one
sh "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/verdicts.sh" prior <dir> <round> <review>

That bin/ is Panel's, never the project you are reviewing. Installed, your working directory is the user's repository, and a bare bin/verdicts.sh finds their script or none. Unset, the variable leaves /bin/verdicts.sh and exit 127 — loud, which is the point.

Hand over the round, and that record in full. On round one, word that this review has stamped none. A path is not a handoff: a judge sent to go and look has been told its history.

Hand over each gate too: its name, its exit code, and what it printed. A gate nobody ran is not a gate that passed. Name the ones you skipped, or the judge records that box unticked — and it should.

bin/brief.sh does all this for a judge on another host. It refuses to print a brief when the chain cannot answer. Nothing refuses you here. Forget it and the judge refuses instead, which is the whole of the enforcement. Refuse when the gap makes a verdict wrong; say so and carry on when it only makes one smaller.

Deeper

The Anti-Patterns