Code Ownership Impact

Code Ownership Impact

Before any change that crosses team or service boundaries, find CODEOWNERS, blast radius, and required reviewers. The output is a multi-team review packet with named approvers per affected path.

Required Loading

Always load:

• prompts/ownership-walk.md — the per-team-ping-list and shared-kernel-detection framework.

When To Run

• Before merging a rename, refactor, deprecate, schema change, or API break.
• Before opening a PR that touches a shared kernel.
• When the author needs to know "who else needs to review this?".
• When a dependency request is being prepared for another team.

Discovery Order

1. Walk the diff (git diff --name-only main..HEAD).
2. For each changed path, resolve the team that owns the path. Use codegraph_files (path → team map) or rg 'path:' CODEOWNERS for a manual lookup.
3. For each team, list the named approvers from the CODEOWNERS file.
4. Detect shared-kernel membership: any file under common/, shared/, pkg/, platform/, or matching a shared-kernel pattern (e.g. *::common::*).
5. Compute the blast radius with codegraph_impact (or rg for the symbol + per-caller Read).
6. For each shared-kernel hit, list the subscriber services and their owning teams.
7. Suggest a review order: smaller teams / least-loaded first, larger / release-train-locked last.

Output Contract

The review packet is grouped by team. For each team, name:

• the path(s) the team owns within the diff
• the named approvers (from CODEOWNERS)
• the suggested review deadline (next release-train slot)
• the cross-team impact (for the team's owned services that consume a shared-kernel change)
• the suggested ack-channel (a thread in the team's chat, a CODEOWNERS @-ping, or an RFC subscribe)

A diff that touches no shared kernel and no per-team boundary produces a single-team review packet (one team, the author's team) — that is itself the correct output.

Tools

• codegraph_impact — primary tool for the blast-radius walk.
• codegraph_files — path → team map.
• codegraph_callers / codegraph_callees — boundary crossing (who calls into / who is called from the changed symbol).
• codegraph_search — locate a shared-kernel file by name.
• Fallback — rg 'path:' CODEOWNERS + git log -- <path> for per-path ownership inference. The fallback is acceptable but not as precise.

Fallback

If CodeGraph is unavailable, the fallback is rg CODEOWNERS + git log per changed path. The final report must include the line:

CodeGraph unavailable; ownership gathered by rg/file inspection.

Related Skills

• spec-doc-linter — keeps DevAgent.md / CONTEXT.md honest; this skill is the human-side counterpart for cross-team change.
• cross-team-rfc-draft (planned v0.6.1) — the long-form RFC for changes that need a written proposal. code-ownership-impact is the per-PR packet; cross-team-rfc-draft is the proposal.
• goal-driven-development — orchestrates the spec-to-code flow; code-ownership-impact is the pre-merge counterpart that names approvers.

Examples

Each bad-* doc has a matching good-* in examples/ showing the minimum packet. Read them side by side to calibrate packet depth. examples/ownership-output.md is the canonical "what the agent should emit" sample.