Red Team Review

Red Team Review Loop

An iterative review loop where research is bundled via context-bundler and dispatched to one or more adversarial reviewers. The loop continues until the red team approves.

When to Use

• Architecture or design decisions that need adversarial scrutiny
• Research findings that need epistemic validation
• Security analysis that needs independent verification
• Any work product where "more eyes" reduce risk

Process Flow

1. Research & Analyze — Deep-dive into the problem domain. Create analysis docs, capture sources.
2. Review Packet Generation — Prepare the context for the reviewer:
   • Create Prompt: Write or update a red-team-prompt.md explaining exactly what is being reviewed and what the reviewer should focus on.
   • Define Manifest: Update a manifest.json or equivalent list dictating which source files and research artifacts to include.
   • Bundle Context: Execute the context-bundler skill (dev-utils) in Multi-Persona Fan-Out Mode, feeding it the manifest and prompt, to compile one review packet per persona in the Graph Planning Phase 1 Fan-Out Trio: Architecture Skeptic, Security / Edge-Case Auditor, TDD Contract Reviewer — per graph-planning-superpowers-policy.md §2.2-2.3. Use a narrower single-persona bundle only when the review scope is genuinely single-dimensional (e.g. a pure security patch).
   • Iteration Directory Isolation: Bundle the context and save the output to explicitly isolated directories (e.g., .history/review-iteration-1/) so that when the Red Team forces a rewrite, the baseline artifact is never destructively overwritten. 2.5. Interactively Determine CLI and Model (ask once during bootstrap): Before dispatching context bundles to CLI agents:
   • Interactively ask the user: "Which LLM CLI backend should be used for the adversarial review?" (Options: agy, claude, copilot, codex, llama).
   • Ask: "Which specific model should be used?" (Present defaults, e.g., Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) for high reasoning or Gemini 3.5 Flash (Low) for fast scans).
   • Ensure you append < /dev/null to the run command to prevent SIGTTIN hangs in headless execution engines.
3. Dispatch to Reviewers — Send each persona's bundle (in parallel, one dispatch per persona) using the selected CLI and model to:
   • Human reviewers (paste-to-chat or browser)
   • CLI agents with matching personas: architect-review (Architecture Skeptic), security-auditor (Security / Edge-Case Auditor), tdd-contract-reviewer (TDD Contract Reviewer) — all in cli-agents
   • Browser-based agents for interactive review
4. Receive Feedback — Capture the red team's verdict:
   • "More Research Needed" → Loop back to step 1 with targeted questions
   • Convergence Limit: Track the total round count across the whole loop (not per-issue). If 2-3 rounds pass without an "Approved" verdict, stop looping — escalate the outstanding disagreement to the Orchestrator/User for a tie-breaking decision rather than continuing to iterate. This is distinct from the same-issue deadlock-breaker in references/fallback-tree.md — either condition ends the loop.
   • Asynchronous Benchmark Metric Capture: Explicitly log the total_tokens and duration_ms used by the adversarial agent during this specific iteration into an evals/timing.json file to calculate the true cost of approval. 4.5. Trust But Verify & TDD (Verification Gate): Do not blindly trust the reviewer's approval or feedback:
   • TDD Enforcement: Prioritize running unit and integration tests to ensure no regressions were introduced by any accepted recommendations.
   • Delta Inspection: Check modified files directly for stubs, stales, or placeholders.
   • Verify Critic Quality: Verify that the critic model's feedback is comprehensive and is not simply agreeing without actual critique.
5. Completion & Handoff — Once the Red Team verdicts "Approved":
   • Terminate the review loop.
   • Pass the final, approved research and feedback documents back to the Orchestrator.
   • DO NOT attempt to seal the session or run a retrospective. The Orchestrator handles that.

Dependencies

• context-bundler (dev-utils) — Required for creating review packets, including Multi-Persona Fan-Out Mode
• Adversarial personas: default set is architect-review, security-auditor, tdd-contract-reviewer from the cli-agents plugin (plugins/cli-agents/agents/). A user-supplied system prompt may replace any of the three. The personas/ directory is no longer bundled with agent-orchestration/.

Diagram

See: red_team_review_loop.mmd