Execution-Grounded Review
A normal review reads the diff and asks "does this look right?" — and an
implementation can look complete while a criterion silently fails. This skill
refuses to grade an implementation on appearance: it runs the suite first,
then traces each acceptance criterion to execution evidence — a test that
actually exercised it, or observed behaviour — and marks anything it cannot
back with execution as UNVERIFIED rather than passing it on faith.
It is the execution-grounded verifier in the agent-patterns review family:
where adversarial-review attacks a design for faults and cold-read-gate
measures whether text survives a reader, this skill verifies that running
code meets its stated acceptance criteria. It is the reusable independent
verifier a judgement-based loop gate delegates to (.claude/rules/loop-integrity.md, Pillar 1).
When to Use This Skill
| Use this skill when... | Use something else instead when... |
|---|
| Verifying an implementation meets explicit acceptance criteria, proven by running it | First-pass review of a diff → code-quality-plugin:code-review |
Gating a loop/phase done on an independent check of behaviour | Red-teaming a design or ADR for faults → agent-patterns-plugin:adversarial-review |
| Confirming a fix actually fixes the reported failure (not just compiles) | Checking premises/facts before work starts → agent-patterns-plugin:verify-before-plan |
| Closing the loop on "is every requirement actually covered by a test?" | Legibility of outward text → agent-patterns-plugin:cold-read-gate |
The Stance
| Move | What it means |
|---|
| Execute first | Run the full suite + typecheck + lint before any verdict. A criterion is PASS only with execution evidence — never "the code looks like it does this". |
| Trace each criterion | One ledger row per acceptance criterion: premise → evidence (file:line / test name / observed output) → verdict. |
| No silent pass | A criterion with no execution backing is UNVERIFIED (a coverage gap to surface), not an assumed pass. |
| Match the production sequence | For a round-trip / determinism / reproducibility / idempotence claim, a passing test is evidence only if its operation sequence reproduces the real production call path — not a convenient shorter one (see Step 3a). |
| Intent-starved verifier | The isolated verifier reads the criteria, the diff, and the captured execution evidence — not the author's plan narrative or rationale, which would let it rationalise a pass. |
| Bounded loop | One revise round on fail; a third means a structural problem the gate can't resolve. |
Model is opus — like adversarial-review, the inverse of cold-read-gate:
building an accurate requirement→evidence ledger is a reasoning task.
Parameters
Parse $ARGUMENTS:
- Target (first positional) — what to verify: a path, a PR ref (
#123 or
URL), explicit files, or absent. If absent, default to the current change
(git diff HEAD + staged) and say so.
--criteria <file> (optional) — a file of acceptance criteria. If absent,
gather criteria from the task/plan in context (the acceptance criteria stated
for this change) and echo them back before verifying, so the user can
correct the list the skill is grading against.
Execution
Execute this execution-grounded verification:
Step 1: Run the suite first
Before reading the diff for "correctness", establish ground truth by execution.
Detect and run the project's full suite + typecheck + lint, capturing output to
a scratch file (this is the execution evidence the verifier grades against):
| Stack | Suite | Typecheck | Lint |
|---|
| Node/TS | npm test (or npx vitest run) | npx tsc --noEmit | npx biome check |
| Python | uv run pytest -q | uv run ty check | uv run ruff check |
| Rust | cargo test | cargo check | cargo clippy |
| Go | go test ./... | go vet ./... | — |
Record the exit codes and failing-test names. A red suite is itself an
independent signal — a failing test does not care how hard the author worked
(.claude/rules/loop-integrity.md).
Step 2: Name the criteria
State, in one numbered list, the acceptance criteria under verification (from
--criteria or context). If the list is empty, stop and ask for it — there is
nothing to ground a verdict in. Each criterion is one ledger row in Step 3.
Step 3: Dispatch the intent-starved verifier
One Agent, model: opus, reading only the criteria, the diff, and the
captured execution-evidence file — not the author's reasoning. Bind its output
to the LEDGER schema below and paste that schema verbatim into the brief:
a schema forces a determinate answer on every row where prose lets a row go
quietly unanswered.
The LEDGER schema
{
"type": "object",
"required": ["rows", "coverage", "verdict"],
"properties": {
"rows": {
"type": "array",
"items": {
"type": "object",
"required": ["criterion", "evidence", "verdict", "sequenceMatchesProduction"],
"properties": {
"criterion": { "type": "string" },
"evidence": {
evidence is the test name / file:line / observed output drawn from the
execution-evidence file, or the literal none. coverage is
<#rows with PASS/FAIL evidence> / <total rows>.
| Row verdict | Meaning |
|---|
PASS | execution evidence demonstrates the criterion holds |
FAIL | execution evidence demonstrates it is violated — name the concrete failing input/test |
PARTIAL | covered for some inputs; a stated edge case is unhandled |
UNVERIFIED | no execution exercises this criterion (a coverage gap) — never pass a row because the code "looks right" |
sequenceMatchesProduction is required on every row, and that requirement
is the entire gain of the schema. Step 3a's check is the one a verifier skips
silently when it is only prose, because a green test looks like evidence — a
required enum makes "I did not check" unrepresentable.
| Value | When |
|---|
yes | the test's operation sequence reproduces the real production call path |
no | the test passes over a shorter or rearranged sequence than production uses → the row's verdict becomes UNVERIFIED |
not-applicable | the criterion makes no round-trip / determinism / reproducibility / idempotence claim |
The overall verdict is pass only when every row is PASS and no row is
sequenceMatchesProduction: "no". Any FAIL, any UNVERIFIED, or any sequence
divergence makes it fail.
Template:
subagent_type: general-purpose
model: opus
prompt: |
You verify whether an implementation meets its acceptance criteria, grounded
in EXECUTION EVIDENCE. Read ONLY these inputs (no other files, no repo
exploration beyond resolving evidence cited below):
- Acceptance criteria: <numbered list from Step 2>
- The change under review: <diff / file paths>
- Execution evidence (suite/typecheck/lint output): <scratch file path>
Do NOT read the author's plan, commit narrative, or rationale — grade the
behaviour, not the intent.
Emit ONE object conforming to this schema, with one row per criterion:
<paste the LEDGER schema verbatim>
For every row, decide `sequenceMatchesProduction` explicitly: identify what
real call sequence exercises the claim in production and confirm the test
reproduces that sequence, not just a convenient shorter one.
Cite evidence for every row. Your final message is the deliverable.
No workflow harness here — deliberately. The schema is the whole delta;
agent count stays at one. This skill is the Pillar-1 oracle other loops
delegate their stop condition to, so a fan-out design would multiply through
every iteration of every loop in the repo — the one place where per-invocation
cost compounds rather than adds (.claude/rules/workflow-vs-skill.md).
For several independent targets, dispatch one verifier per target in a
single-message parallel Agent batch — except on a [1m] model, where the
concurrent-subagent rate-limit caveat applies (skill-fork-context.md); run
those sequentially. Do not set context: fork — the caller needs the ledger
in the main context to act on it.
Step 3a: Match the test's operation sequence to production
"A passing test exists for this claim" is not sufficient evidence for a
round-trip, determinism, reproducibility, or idempotence claim. The test can
pass while the design is broken, because a narrower hand-built repro silently
avoids the exact ordering that would expose a divergence. The tell is when the
test's sequence of operations differs from the real call path production uses.
So for any such claim, add a step to the verifier's brief:
Identify what real call sequence exercises this claim in production, and
confirm the test under review reproduces that sequence — not just a convenient
shorter one.
Stateful / RNG-dependent code is the high-risk class — lazy initialization,
global mutable RNG state, and caching all defer or share observable state, so
when an operation runs relative to its neighbours changes the result. A test
of the shape construct → forward immediately and a production path of
construct → generate batches (consuming lazy RNG) → first forward draw their
deferred state at the same relative point in each stream, so the round-trip
"works" with no error — while a real trained model's reload diverges. The
passing test is real; it just exercises the one ordering that can't see the bug.
Grade such a claim UNVERIFIED until the test reproduces the production
sequence, even though a green test exists — that is the row whose
sequenceMatchesProduction is no.
Step 4: Triage against over-correction
The verifier grades strictly, so guard both failure modes before acting —
neither talk yourself into passing broken code, nor into failing correct code:
| Act on it | Drop it |
|---|
A FAIL with a named failing test/input | A FAIL on a requirement the spec never stated |
An UNVERIFIED criterion → write/run the missing test, then re-grade | An UNVERIFIED on behaviour outside the change's responsibility |
A PARTIAL where a stated edge case is unhandled | Style/preference dressed up as a criterion failure |
| A coverage gap on a load-bearing criterion | A hypothetical input the contract makes impossible |
| A round-trip/determinism test whose sequence diverges from production (Step 3a) | A sequence difference that provably can't affect the claim's outcome |
Step 5: Report and bound the loop
Emit the ledger: target, per-criterion rows with evidence, COVERAGE, and the
overall verdict. Apply or hand off the genuine fixes (closing UNVERIFIED rows
by adding the missing test counts as a fix). Re-run from Step 1 only if the
verdict was fail; do not loop more than twice — a third round means a
structural problem the gate can't resolve, which is the signal to surface to a
human, not to keep grinding.
Anti-patterns
| Mistake | Correct approach |
|---|
| Grading the diff without running anything | Execute first (Step 1) — appearance is not evidence |
| Passing a criterion because the code "looks like it does that" | No execution evidence → UNVERIFIED, not pass |
| Passing a round-trip/determinism claim because "a test exists and passes" | Confirm the test's operation sequence matches the production call path (Step 3a) |
| Feeding the verifier the author's plan/rationale | Intent-starved inputs — criteria + diff + execution evidence only |
| Inventing requirements the spec never stated | Triage (Step 4) — FAIL only on listed criteria |
| Looping until the verifier goes quiet | One revise round; persistent fail = structural problem |
Related
adversarial-review — attacks a design
for faults; this skill verifies running behaviour against criteriaverify-before-plan — verifies premises
before work; this verifies outcomes aftercold-read-gate — the isolation + triage +
bounded-loop pattern this skill reuses (legibility lens; uses haiku)code-quality-plugin:code-review — the first-pass review this layers on top ofworkflow-orchestration-plugin:workflow-checkpoint-refactor — a loop whose
phase gate delegates its independent verdict here.claude/rules/loop-integrity.md — Pillar 1: a loop's stop condition is judged
by an independent verifier like this one, not the worker. Keep this literal
path in the body: scripts/check-loop-integrity.sh requires the token
loop-integrity.md in this file, so a later "tighten the Related section" edit
that drops it fails the build.
