Session Review

Session Review — the adversarial closing loop

Stress-test a session's work before it sets, using reviewers who don't share your blind spots. You wrote the work, so you are the worst person to spot what you assumed. The loop ends in action: cheap-safe fixes applied immediately, the rest recorded as a measurable plan, and anything you disagree with explicitly challenged — not silently accepted, not silently dropped.

Invocation is usually EXPLICIT (/session-review) — "review" is something the agent does natively, so don't expect auto-triggering; invoke it by name at session close.

The loop

1. Assemble the brief (the load-bearing step)

Write ONE self-contained markdown brief (e.g. to /tmp/<repo>-session-review.md). It is the only context the reviewers get. It must contain:

• An assigned role that fits the work ("Principal Engineer" for a feature slice, "Security reviewer" for auth work) — the role is the lens.
• Project context a stranger can follow, the session goal, and what was built, with concrete file:line references.
• The specific decision points you most want challenged — and for anything that turns on CURRENT best practice, an explicit ask to web-check with sources.
• What to return — a structured verdict with severity, file refs, a short MEASURABLE plan.

Never let the brief be the reviewer's only window: tell the code-reader explicitly "do not trust this summary — read the actual files." Your summary is where your blind spots live.

2. Run the reviewers IN PARALLEL (same message)

• Reviewer A — the isolated code-reader. Spawn idea-validator pointed at the brief AND the actual files, with the currency instruction: "web-check whether every library / runtime / pattern I chose is still the right choice this year, cite sources." Without that line it only verifies claims you explicitly made — dated tech slips through.
• Reviewer B — an external-family model (if available), reviewing from the brief only. Different training distribution, different blind spots; lean on it for concept and tech-currency, not file-level facts.
• One reviewer alone (A) is still a valid light review — note the absence and proceed.

3. Synthesize — agree vs diverge

Where reviewers independently land on the same finding — high-confidence signal, promote it. Where they diverge — the highest-value rows: adjudicate on merits. On facts about the code the code-reader wins; never count votes. The full adjudication procedure — acceptance layers, the claim→check table, how a disputed finding is allowed to close — is reference/orchestrator-fact-check.md.

4. Act (the loop must end in action)

• Accept now: cheap, safe, low-blast-radius fixes — apply this session, verify by artifact (typecheck / lint / tests), don't round toward success.
• Plan, measured: larger items become backlog entries, each with a metric for the win. A plan item with no measurable outcome is a task for task's sake — drop it.
• Challenge: for anything you disagree with, write back WHY. Holding your ground with a reason is the partnership — blind acceptance defeats the loop.

5. Measure the outcome

Close with what the loop produced: findings found / applied / planned / challenged, what you had missed, what tech-currency facts updated. That's how you know it earned its tokens.

6. Retrospective on the machine (so quality compounds)

Steps 1-5 review the WORK; this reviews the SYSTEM that produced it. Three questions, backed by what actually happened this session:

• What foundation element (a rule, a MEMORY line, a handoff, a pattern) EARNED its keep — name the concrete moment. Keep those.
• Where did the foundation give friction or a gap — stale, duplicated, missing? Fix/merge/prune.
• How did the orchestration go — right agents, good-enough briefs, honest adjudication? (reference/parallel-development.md for the fan-out defaults and stop-conditions.)

A CONFIRMED finding is worth a row in the findings-class registry, and a class recurring three times earns promotion into the cheapest layer that prevents it — reference/review-loop.md.

Output: at most 1-3 minimal, evidence-backed adjustments, biased to subtract before add. "Keep doing" is a valid output — most sessions should change the foundation little.

Guardrails

• Never blind-accept. Rejecting a finding with a reason is a success, not a failure.
• Separate "now" from "plan" by RISK, not importance — big-blast-radius changes at the end of a long session belong in the plan, done fresh.
• Scale to the work: small session → light brief, single reviewer; architecture change → the full role-assigned, fact-checked, multi-reviewer pass.