Plan Review Artifact Authority And Approval Drift

Plan Review Artifact Authority and Approval Drift

Use when a local plan has gone through multiple adversarial review waves and any of these are true:

• a self-review artifact exists and later external Codex/Codex/Gemini reruns also exist
• the issue still carries status:plan-approved or .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md from an older revision
• docs/plans/README.md status lags the current effective review state

Rules

1. Latest external reruns are authoritative for the current draft.

   • Update the plan header Review artifacts line to point at the newest external rerun artifacts.
   • Update the Artifact Map to list those newest external rerun artifacts.
   • If you keep a self-review artifact, label it explicitly as historical or non-authoritative relative to the external rerun.

2. Describe approval drift precisely.

   • If status:plan-approved and/or .planning/plan-approved/<issue>.md still exist but fresh external reruns returned MAJOR, do not say "no approval exists".
   • Say the approval signals exist but apply to an older revision, and therefore do not approve the current draft revision.

3. Keep the review summary synchronized.

   • In ## Adversarial Review Summary, record the latest completed external rerun verdicts.
   • Summarize exactly what changed in the newest patch wave.
   • State clearly whether the current draft is still blocked from GitHub posting.

4. Treat mutable fanout outputs as diagnostic until promoted to immutable evidence.

   • Do not cite mutable paths like scripts/review/results/YYYY-MM-DD-plan-<issue>-AGENTS.md as approval evidence unless they are committed, non-empty, SHA-bound to the reviewed plan revision, and contain a parseable ## Verdict/## Verdicts section.
   • Prefer timestamped or round-suffixed immutable provider artifacts for gate evidence, e.g. scripts/review/results/YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ-plan-<issue>-AGENTS.md or scripts/review/results/YYYY-MM-DD-plan-<issue>-Codex-r2.md.
   • Provider artifacts are authoritative over disagreement/synthesis artifacts. If a disagreement summary conflicts with the provider files, treat the conflict as a gate blocker until adjudicated; do not let the synthesis file override provider verdicts.
   • If a fanout rewrites mutable artifacts to empty/truncated files or leaves only .err files, mark that run as diagnostic/provider-infra evidence only and rerun or copy fresh valid artifacts before claiming review clearance.
   • If mutable canonical outputs are 0 bytes after a completed run but round-suffixed archive artifacts are populated, treat that as an inverted-routing/review-infra state: verify file sizes in the real worktree, archive the non-empty artifacts with explicit provenance, and rerun or create non-empty UNAVAILABLE artifacts before citing the canonical paths. Never cite empty canonical files as valid evidence.
   • If all providers are simultaneously UNAVAILABLE, the plan is not approval-ready by default. Escalate to the user with the attempted commands, stderr/stdout byte counts, and artifact paths; require a fresh valid provider review or explicit documented user override before implementation.
   • When a provider cannot read local files and switches to GitHub/main retrieval, commit and push the current plan first, then verify the remote path/sha or URL before treating the review as authoritative. Inline or uncommitted-plan reviews can be useful feedback, but they must not be represented as approval evidence for the canonical plan until the canonical committed plan matches the reviewed text.
   • If a provider falls back to MCP-only or remote-only retrieval because local sandboxing fails (for example bwrap/namespace errors), classify it as valid only when the artifact cites immutable GitHub/blob/commit evidence and states the local limitation. Otherwise classify it as UNAVAILABLE, not as a substantive approval signal.

5. Do not hand-wave README drift.

   • If docs/plans/README.md is accurate, treat it as verification-only state.
   • If it is stale relative to fresh review evidence, make the plan require explicit state-sync rather than merely saying "verify the row remains correct".

Useful patch targets inside the plan

• Header status line
• Header review-artifacts line
• ### Documents consulted
• ### Evidence (embedded verification)
• ## Artifact Map
• ## Pseudocode
• ## TDD Test List
• ## Acceptance Criteria
• ## Adversarial Review Summary

Example wording

• "Live GitHub status:plan-approved and local .planning/plan-approved/2460.md reflect older approval-state drift, not approval of this current draft revision."
• "Historical Codex self-review (non-authoritative compared with external reruns)."
• "Verify/update docs/plans/README.md without re-adding the row; if stale approval drift is present, explicitly sync the row to the effective non-approved state."