Cold Review

name: cold-review description: >- Fresh-context entailment check with a fixed contract: a reviewer that never saw the drafting conversation reads baseline + candidate, paragraph-aligned, hunting inverted claims, numbers reattached to wrong claims, altered quotations, and hedges that change assertions; verdicts limited to ship as-is / ship with listed verbatim-reverts / reject. Every accepted fix is a revert to the baseline span — no authored prose. Ships a mechanical drift screen and a revert applier with invariant re-checks. Triggers: cold review, cold read the candidate, entailment check, fresh-context review, did the rewrite change the meaning, revert list. argument-hint: 'screen|apply --baseline <b.md> --candidate <c.md>'

Cold Review (fresh-context entailment, reverts only)

Every generative stage measured against a cold read lost most of its raw gain there, and the two 2026-09-01 runs that fixed this contract caught real damage both times: swapped 0.768/0.867 arm numbers, an inverted improvement direction, a lost constitution bridge sentence — and, on the second run, confirmed ship-as-is with zero reverts, which is also a result. The prompt was re-improvised per run; now it is versioned.

The contract

• Fresh context, maker is not checker. The reviewer sees only the baseline, the candidate, the caller's named high-value targets, the constitution's [CHECK] items when the form has one, and the mechanical screen's findings. Never the rewrite history, reasoning, or diffs.
• Meaning entailment, paragraph by paragraph: inverted claims, numbers reattached to wrong claims, altered quotations (including reattributed judgment), hedges that change assertions, [CHECK] items no longer satisfied.
• Closed verdict vocabulary: ship as-is | ship with reverts: p<N>: <damage> | reject candidate: <why>. The reviewer never proposes prose.
• The repair rule: every accepted fix is a verbatim revert to the baseline span — kept-original at paragraph level, no authored prose. Damage that reverts cannot save (structural) rejects the candidate.

The prompt template with slots is references/review-prompt.md.

The scripts (deterministic halves)

# recall aid for the reviewer: mechanical drift per aligned paragraph
python3 <skill>/scripts/cold_review.py screen \
  --baseline base.md --candidate cand.md [--json]

# apply an accepted revert list, verbatim, with invariant re-checks
python3 <skill>/scripts/cold_review.py apply \
  --baseline base.md --candidate cand.md --revert "3,7" --out gated.md

screen flags number-multiset changes (citations masked), citation changes, and altered double-quoted spans; it is a recall aid, not the review — an inverted claim carries the same numbers and only the model catches it. apply swaps the named paragraphs back to the baseline text and re-checks the invariants on the written bytes: locked spans preserved, paragraph count stable, reverted paragraphs byte-identical to baseline. Both refuse mismatched paragraph counts — the chain rewrites 1:1, and a count drift means index reverts would land on the wrong text.

Position

Caller's review phase (GH-208), after critic-apply and before voice-critic: the gated candidate is what the scores are believed on. Read-only plus reverts — a revert authors nothing, so running it after the terminal stage does not violate the GH-57 contract.

Offline tests: scripts/test_cold_review.py (a planted number swap yields a revert list naming it; the applier restores baseline bytes).