Review

Review Skill

Overview

One adversarial review pass over the complete integrated diff (the feature branch vs main). A single fresh-context reviewer judges spec-compliance, code quality, and test adequacy together — there is no separate spec-then-quality staging. The pass emits one verdict (reviews.review.status).

Posture: you are an ADVERSARIAL reviewer. Your job is to find what is wrong, not to confirm what is right.

MANDATORY: before accepting any rationalization for approving without full verification, consult references/rationalization-refutation.md. Every common excuse is catalogued with a counter-argument and the correct action.

Execution Context

This skill runs in a SUBAGENT spawned by the orchestrator, not inline — a clean reviewer with no authoring transcript, provisioned with the diff + the spec.

The orchestrator:

1. Generates the integrated diff once: exarchos_orchestrate({ action: "review_diff", baseBranch: "main" }) (or git diff main...HEAD).
2. Passes the diff content + the state file path (for artifact resolution) + the intent grounding in the dispatch prompt.

The subagent reads the spec from state, runs the gates against the working tree, performs the adversarial walkthrough, and returns one structured JSON verdict.

Intent grounding (intended-vs-delivered)

The orchestrator captures the intended change as artifacts.intent and threads it into the dispatch as an intentGrounding directive. When present, verify the delivered diff against it:

• Intended-but-missing — a surface or outcome the intent calls for that the diff does not deliver. Flag as a spec issue.
• Delivered-but-unintended (scope creep) — changes outside the intended surfaces with no spec justification. Flag as a spec issue.

When no intentGrounding is supplied, review against the diff alone — do not fabricate an intent.

What the pass covers

Pick the approach first: exarchos_orchestrate({ action: "runbook", id: "review-strategy" }) — single-pass vs two-pass, by diff size and prior fix-cycle count.

Review the combined diff across all tasks in one view — this catches cross-task interface mismatches, bugs invisible in isolation, and inconsistent patterns. Cover all three lenses in the single pass:

1. Spec-compliance — functional completeness, specification alignment, intended-vs-delivered. See references/spec-compliance-checklist.md.
2. Test adequacy — outcome-based, tier-scaled (not test-first ordering). Run the kill-probe so a vacuous test fails the gate:

   exarchos_orchestrate({
     action: "check_test_adequacy",
     featureId: "<featureId>",
     taskId: "<taskId>",
     branch: "<branch>",
     riskTier: "<low|medium|high>",
     phase: "review"
   })
   

3. Code quality — correctness, SOLID, error handling, security, performance, maintainability, and test desiderata (behavioral / structure-insensitive / deterministic / specific). See references/code-quality-checklist.md, references/security-checklist.md, references/typescript-standards.md.

Gate execution

Run the quality-evaluation gates via runbook — exarchos_orchestrate({ action: "runbook", id: "quality-evaluation" }) — then execute the MCP-served quality-check catalog. See references/gate-execution.md for signatures.

1. check_static_analysis — lint + typecheck (D2). Must pass.
2. check_security_scan — security pattern detection (D1).
3. prepare_review — returns the deterministic check catalog (grep / structural / heuristic) + pluginStatus. Execute each check against the changed files; collect findings as pluginFindings.
4. Optional D3–D5 gates (check_context_economy, check_operational_resilience, check_workflow_determinism) — advisory; feed the convergence view.

mutation-adequacy (HIGH tier only): a separate required dimension that gates the HIGH risk tier at the /review boundary — see @skills/mutation-adequacy/SKILL.md. Do not run mutation testing in this skill; the closest in-scope proxy is the Specific test-desiderata property plus the delegation-time check_test_adequacy gate.

Invariant conformance — audit-mode judgment is YOURS

Run check_invariant_conformance over the diff whenever a catalog is registered under .exarchos.yml: invariants.catalogs. It decides mode: check invariants mechanically and folds them into findings. It cannot decide mode: audit invariants at all — those need a reviewer's judgment, which is you.

exarchos_orchestrate({
  action: "check_invariant_conformance",
  featureId: "<id>",
  phase: "review",
  diff: "<integrated diff>"
})

The response carries the audit-mode delivery pair:

• auditPrompt — the rendered judgment questions, one block per applicable audit-mode invariant.
• auditInvariantIds — the ids in that prompt. This is your checklist, and it is the denominator you are accountable for.
• auditProjection — rendered, no-audit-entries, or no-subject. no-subject is not a clean audit: the projection resolved zero applicable entries, so nothing was evaluated. Treat it as an unresolved gate (catalog unregistered, projection over-narrowed) and say so in the verdict — never as a pass.

Answer every id in auditInvariantIds. For each one, read its block in auditPrompt, judge the diff against it, and:

• Violated → emit a finding and pass it in pluginFindings on check_review_verdict, with dimension set to the invariant id and severity from the invariant's own severity (blocking → HIGH, advisory → MEDIUM).
• Satisfied → record it in the verdict summary so the id is visibly accounted for.

An audit-mode invariant you did not answer is not a passing invariant — it is an unrun check. Leaving auditPrompt unread makes the whole audit-mode half of the catalog decorative, which is the exact failure the catalog exists to prevent.

Verdict & fix loop

Compute the verdict once over the merged finding set. Route it via the decision runbook — exarchos_orchestrate({ action: "runbook", id: "review-escalation" }). See references/convergence-and-verdict.md.

check_review_verdict takes the finding counts + the pluginFindings, emits the gate event, and returns APPROVED or NEEDS_FIXES:

exarchos_orchestrate({
  action: "check_review_verdict",
  featureId: "<id>",
  high: nativeHighCount,
  medium: nativeMediumCount,
  low: nativeLowCount,
  pluginFindings: catalogFindings,
})

The fix loop is bounded by the shared escalation policy (config-resolvable escalation.maxIterations, default 5) — the same bound the shepherd loop uses. check_review_verdict reads the event-sourced fix-cycle count and returns the escalate decision the loop MUST honor:

• Auto-fix (under the bound, mechanical findings) — escalate absent/falsy: re-dispatch to the implementer with the findings and re-review.
• Escalate to the user — escalate: true: surface the findings + escalationReason and ask how to proceed, when EITHER the bound is reached OR a finding is intent-touching (a spec issue that changes what was asked for — a human decides, not the loop).

Companion plugin (platform-dependent): on platforms with skill support the orchestrator may also invoke impeccable:critique for frontend diffs; feed its findings as additional pluginFindings.

Gate events: do NOT manually emit gate.executed — check_review_verdict emits it. Manual emission duplicates.

Required output format

The subagent MUST return one structured JSON verdict. Any other format is an error.

{
  "verdict": "pass | fail | blocked",
  "summary": "1-2 sentence summary",
  "issues": [
    {
      "severity": "HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW",
      "category": "spec | tdd | coverage | security | solid | dry | perf | naming | test-quality | other",
      "file": "path/to/file",
      "line": 123,
      "description": "Issue description",
      "required_fix": "What must change"
    }
  ],
  "test_results": { "passed": 0, "failed": 0, "coverage_percent": 0 }
}

State & transition

Record the verdict as an object with a status field (a flat string is silently ignored by the guard):

APPROVED:

exarchos_workflow({ action: "update", featureId: "<id>", updates: {
  reviews: { "review": { status: "pass", summary: "...", issues: [] } }
}})
exarchos_workflow({ action: "transition", featureId: "<id>", target: "synthesize" })

Then invoke synthesize.

NEEDS_FIXES:

exarchos_workflow({ action: "update", featureId: "<id>", updates: {
  reviews: { "review": { status: "fail", summary: "...", issues: [{ severity: "HIGH", file: "...", description: "..." }] } }
}})

Then invoke delegate --fixes.

Guard: review → synthesize requires all-reviews-passed — every required dimension's reviews.{name}.status must be a passing value (pass | passed | approved | fixes-applied, case-insensitive). The feature roster is review (+ mutation-adequacy at HIGH tier). review → delegate fires on any-review-failed.

All transitions are automatic — this is not a human checkpoint. See references/auto-transition.md.

Anti-patterns

Schema discovery

Use exarchos_workflow({ action: "describe", actions: ["update"] }) and exarchos_orchestrate({ action: "describe", actions: ["check_static_analysis", "check_security_scan", "check_test_adequacy", "check_review_verdict", "check_invariant_conformance", "prepare_review"] }) for current parameter schemas.