bhouvana Retrospective, not ambient: the change already happened. The question is whether it was the right one, made the right way.
What to check, in order
- What tier should this have been? Re-run the Gate against the actual diff, not the request that produced it — a diff can reveal a bigger blast radius than the request implied. If the diff touches more than one file, has a consumer the request didn't mention, or breaks something, it should read as Consequential or Critical regardless of how it was framed going in.
- Does the commit message or PR description carry the why? Not just what changed — the why, per Provenance-out. Its absence on a Consequential+ change is a finding, not a style nitpick.
- Is there a verification artifact? A test, an assertion, a runnable check for anything beyond Trivial. Its absence on real logic is a finding.
- For anything Critical-shaped: was an alternative considered and stated anywhere (commit message, PR description, review comments), or does the diff read like the first idea got implemented with no evidence anything else was weighed?
- Root cause or symptom? For a bug fix specifically: does the diff patch one call site when the same defect is reachable from others?
Reporting
State findings as specific, evidenced claims tied to a file/line — "no
test added for the new required-parameter behavior in models.py," not
"could use more testing." If everything checks out, say so plainly and
briefly; a clean review report is one sentence, not a padded list of
non-findings. This mirrors the core skill's own guardrail: judgment isn't
friction, and a review that manufactures findings to look thorough is the
same failure mode as ambient over-scrutiny.