Self Review

/self-review

One complete review pass of the feature branch against its base, wired into planwright's act-then-review autonomy gate (REQ-E2.1, D-12): Discovery Rigor produces the finding list, Validation Rigor confirms it, the finding categorization routes each confirmed finding to a disposition, and the gate wiring's audit record is the handoff. /polish iterates it to convergence; this skill is the single pass.

Doctrine

This skill is procedure, not doctrine. Resolve these rule docs via the rule-doc resolution convention (scripts/resolve-rule-doc.sh <doc-name> under the resolved planwright root, or the documented PLANWRIGHT_ROOT/CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT chain); their definitions govern wherever this skill names a concept:

• discovery-rigor — lens checklist, lens-coverage table, tool-grounded discovery, fan-out, self-critique pass
• validation-rigor — the three identification passes plus the adversarial bi-directional re-validation; solution validation, including the altitude check, with surface-relative whole-system end-to-end reproduction preferred
• finding-categorization — the four buckets, their predicates, hard pauses and the hard-disqualifier zones, declined-with-rationale, the resolution ladder
• gate-wiring — routing order, commit discipline, checklist and audit formats, ladder procedure, pause protocol, loop-end handoff, PR-body assembly
• research-rigor (point-of-use), refactor-instinct (review mode), security-posture (artifact data-hygiene), proportionality (declared scoping)

If a rule doc does not resolve, halt with a clear message naming the missing doc and the resolution chain consulted.

Doctrine manifest (the reading model above in machine-parseable form, per doctrine/instruction-hygiene.md; run-start docs load before work begins, point-of-use at the named step):

Doctrine: run-start discovery-rigor Doctrine: run-start validation-rigor Doctrine: run-start finding-categorization Doctrine: run-start gate-wiring Doctrine: point-of-use research-rigor (the Validation step, where research triggers fire) Doctrine: run-start refactor-instinct Doctrine: run-start security-posture Doctrine: run-start proportionality

Invocation modes

Read the literal flag --nested from $ARGUMENTS at the start of the run:

• Standalone (no flag): the pass ends by pushing the branch and creating or updating a draft PR carrying the audit record (see "Publishing the audit record").
• Nested (--nested): another planwright skill (typically /polish) invoked this pass and owns everything after it. Skip push and PR handling; hand the audit record back to the invoking skill. It may pass its loop ledger of already-dispositioned findings: a re-discovered finding that already carries a disposition is reported in the audit record but never re-routed, re-applied, or re-paused. One exception: surface a re-discovered finding whose ledger disposition is any on-branch application (applied, resolved, or applied pending sign-off) prominently in the handed-back record; it signals the fix did not hold and feeds the invoking skill's loop detection.

Nested invocation is in-session skill composition (REQ-E2.2, D-13): the pass runs in the invoking skill's session and context, and hooks fire once per actual tool call, not once per skill layer. Record the resolved mode in the pass summary.

Pre-flight

1. Resolve the doctrine docs (above). Halt with a clear message on a resolution failure.
2. Identify the base and capture the diff. Fetch first, then diff against the remote-tracking base: git fetch origin and git diff origin/main...HEAD (substitute the repository's actual default branch). Fall back to the local base only when no remote is configured (REQ-K1.7), since a stale local base inflates the diff with already-merged commits. In nested mode, skip the fetch and reuse the base the invoking skill recorded at its own pre-flight; the parent owns remote interaction. Not a git repository, or no commits to diff: surface a clear message and stop; there is nothing to review.
3. Require a clean working tree. The gate's commit discipline (one commit per Needs-sign-off finding, batched action commits) needs unambiguous boundaries. If git status --porcelain is non-empty, surface the dirty state and ask before proceeding (dispatched or unattended: record the unit to tasks.md Awaiting input and end the step, the pause protocol's dispatched arm); never stash or discard.
4. Run the project's tooling once. Whatever the project ships: linters, formatters, type-checkers, static analyzers, security scanners. Discover them via the project's task runner and config files, CI workflow definitions, and the tool-discovery summary when a SessionStart hook has injected one. Capture the output; it is shared input for every lens. A tool whose runner itself errors out (as opposed to reporting rule violations) is surfaced in the pass summary as degraded grounding for the lenses that rely on it; never treat a crashed tool as a clean pass.
5. Detect the active kickoff brief. Walk in order, stopping at the first unambiguous match: the branch convention planwright/<spec>/task-<ids> names the spec, so the brief is specs/<spec>/kickoff-brief.md (validate the parsed <spec> segment against the spec-identifier discipline, ^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$ and at most 64 characters per REQ-A1.8, before forming the path; a failing segment is treated as no match, never interpolated); a branch-named spec whose own kickoff-brief.md is absent means the brief is absent for this pass, never a fall-through to another spec's brief. Otherwise resolve through the status render (scripts/spec-status.sh / mise run status; invariant-tasks D-6), accepting a specs/*/ bundle whose derived status is Ready or Active — so a format-version-2 bundle with work in flight (stored Ready, derived Active) resolves, not only a stored-Active v1 spec. When exactly one such candidate exists, take its sibling kickoff-brief.md. A render error, zero candidates, or multiple Ready-or-Active candidates are not an unambiguous match: degrade to the existing arm — ask when attended, proceed brief-less when unattended or dispatched (D-2). With no active brief, the Agent-resolvable bucket is unavailable for this pass (its predicate requires brief alignment); record that and proceed with the remaining buckets.

Discovery

Apply the discovery-rigor doc against the diff:

• Fan out by default. Spawn one read-only sub-agent per canonical lens for any non-trivial diff, each with the diff slice, the shared tooling output, and a single-lens brief that forbids severity pruning. Walk the lenses inline only when the diff is small and narrow (a few files, mostly prose or config, a few hundred changed lines at most); inline walking waives no other invariant. Declare which path was taken.
• Merge and dedupe. A finding hitting two lenses gets one row with both labels.
• Filter refactor flags in review mode per refactor-instinct: anchored in tool output or made worse by this branch, otherwise dropped.
• Emit the canonical lens-coverage table before any per-finding output: one row per lens, empty lenses as none or n/a with a one-line reason.
• Run the mandatory self-critique pass: assume the list is incomplete, re-scan for what is under-represented, add what surfaces.

Validation

Apply the validation-rigor doc to every candidate finding. Declared scoping (per proportionality): the full three passes are mandatory for any finding that could be applied on the branch in this pass, which under act-then-review means Auto-applicable, Agent-resolvable, and Needs-sign-off candidates alike. A soft-floor spot-check (drop clear false positives) is sufficient for findings that will only be declined or queued as judgment forks, since the human finishes validation when deciding those. Findings whose passes do not converge are never applied; they are dropped, declined with the divergence recorded, or routed to Needs human judgment per the categorization.

When a finding turns on an external fact (an API contract, spec compliance, a deprecated pattern or security claim, library behavior), the outside-in pass reads research-rigor point-of-use here — source hierarchy, recency discipline, antipattern check.

Routing and dispositions

Route every validated finding through the gate-wiring doc's routing order: zone screen first, then bucket assignment per the finding-categorization predicates, then disposition by bucket. The wiring doc governs the mechanics this skill executes:

• Auto-applicable and Agent-resolvable items are applied or resolved with their audit and evidence rows, and committed per the wiring doc's commit discipline (batched into the pass's action commit); their fixes get solution validation per validation-rigor (targeted check, wider project suite, altitude check). Regression tests for Agent-resolvable items are written first and confirmed to fail for the finding's exact reason before the fix.
• Needs-sign-off items are applied on the branch, one commit per finding with the [pending-sign-off] subject marker, and entered in the pending-sign-off checklist. Before committing, self-lint the subject by piping it in — printf '%s\n' "$subject" | scripts/check-commit-msgs.sh --marker subject --stdin (under the resolved planwright root) — so the marker sits at the canonical end-of-subject position (gate-wiring) and a mis-placed one is reworded before it reaches history.
• Needs-human-judgment candidates climb the resolution ladder; every consulted rung is recorded. Only irreducible forks queue, with bespoke options.
• Declined-with-rationale is available at any step after validation; rationale rows are mandatory.
• A hard-disqualifier zone or a blocking irreducible fork triggers the pause protocol; nothing else interrupts the pass.

Findings whose fix edits a signed bundle carry the three obligations the meta-spec's writer prose states (doctrine/spec-format.md, Sign-off records and content anchors), which governs here. Before the first edit to each Ready or Active bundle's anchored content, run the stale-anchor pre-flight: recompute with the brief's most recent recorded command; a mismatch, an absent or unparseable entry, and a failed recompute each block that edit and surface instead of editing on top of it (findings elsewhere in the diff keep routing normally). A blocked finding is never left undispositioned: it queues as an irreducible fork whose route is the anchor repair. An expression-only fix then lands the edit, its dated Changelog entry, and the marked Class: expression-only self-re-anchor entry citing it in one commit. A meaning-class fix is never applied: leave the bundle untouched and queue it as an irreducible fork naming a /spec-kickoff delta re-walkthrough as the route.

If any applied fix breaks the wider project suite and the breakage cannot be resolved within the finding's own scope, revert that finding's change (new commit, never history rewrite) and surface the failure in the pass summary. The reverted finding's terminal disposition is declined-with-rationale ("fix attempted, broke the wider suite, reverted"), recorded in the declined log, where it stays visible and re-raisable without re-entering the routing order.

The audit record

The pass produces, in this order (the wiring doc's loop-end handoff, extended with the lens-coverage table at the front and the pass summary at the end):

1. The lens-coverage table.
2. The four bucket tables in fixed order, an empty bucket as a single none row, columns per the wiring doc's formats.
3. The declined log.
4. The pending-sign-off checklist, regenerated from the [pending-sign-off] commits ahead of the base per the wiring doc (an empty checklist emits with a single none row).
5. Queued irreducible forks with their bespoke options; in an attended standalone run these are the only questions presented to the human.
6. The pass summary: resolved mode, base used, tooling and wider-suite results, and any reverts or surfaced failures.

Table content lands in a committed PR body: apply security-posture artifact data-hygiene before emitting (no secrets, credentials, or sensitive detail in finding text or captured output).

Publishing the audit record (standalone only)

Skipped entirely in nested mode; the invoking skill owns push and PR. Publishing is the pass's final action: the Observations and Maintenance steps below run first, so their chore commits land before the push.

1. Push: git push origin <branch> (with -u on first push). Never force-push. On push or authentication failure, degrade gracefully (REQ-K1.6, REQ-K1.7): the local work is committed; surface what failed and stop.
2. Draft PR: if a PR already exists for the branch, update its body; otherwise gh pr create --draft with an explicit --title and --body (headless gh prompts or fails without them). Assemble the body per the PR-body assembly section of the gate-wiring doctrine (summary first, the audit record collapsed in <details>, prose never hard-wrapped, the structure preserved on updates) — the single normative home for the layout (D-2). The collapsed audit record is this pass's own (the sequence in The audit record above). On update, regenerate the generated sections in place rather than appending, and never overwrite body content outside them (handwritten notes survive); re-runs never duplicate entries. The PR is always a draft; never mark it ready and never merge (the draft→ready flip is the human's call).

Observations

When the repository has adopted planwright (a specs/ directory with at least one spec bundle exists), record anything noticed during the pass that is outside the branch's scope (complexity growth, outdated patterns, tooling gaps, doctrine gaps) as one fragment per observation through the shared helper: scripts/obs-record.sh --slug <topic> --scope <repo> --text '<observation>' (resolved under the planwright root; it writes one fragment file under the host repo's specs/_observations/entries/). Commit the fragment within the pass (the action commit, or its own chore commit when nothing else landed); never leave the tree dirty at a pass boundary, and surface a non-zero helper exit rather than silently dropping the observation. Do not act on observations during the pass; they are seed material for /spec-draft (REQ-E2.1, REQ-H1.6).

Maintenance

After the pass completes (or halts), compare these instructions against the resolved doctrine docs listed above (REQ-B3.2, D-42). If a concept this skill names has changed meaning, gained or lost a step, or moved between docs, record a drift observation through the shared helper (scripts/obs-record.sh --slug skill-drift --scope <repo> --text 'skill-drift(self-review): <what>' — the entry text keeps the skill-drift(...) prefix; in repositories without specs/, surface the drift to the user instead of recording it), commit the fragment as its own chore commit, tell the user what drifted, and surface a non-zero helper exit rather than silently dropping the observation. Do not edit this skill or the doctrine docs to resolve the drift; /spec-draft owns folding drift into spec amendments.