cross-review-policy

name	cross-review-policy
description	Actionable review routing policy — which agent reviews which agent's work, default three-agent adversarial review
version	1.0.0
category	coordination
tags	["review","routing","cross-review","governance"]
related_skills	["workflow-compliance-audit","session-corpus-audit"]

Cross-Review Policy

Actionable enforcement of the AI Review Routing Policy (docs/standards/AI_REVIEW_ROUTING_POLICY.md).

Provider Roles

Provider	Role	Scope
Codex	Default orchestrator	Task framing, planning, routing, repo-facing workflow
Codex	Default coding worker & adversarial reviewer	Bounded implementation, test writing, refactors, diff review
Gemini	Default adversarial reviewer	Architecture review, large-context research, plan & code review

Default: Three-Agent Adversarial Review

All plan-stage and code/artifact-stage work gets reviewed by ALL three agents unless the user explicitly scopes down.

Plan review

1. Codex frames the plan
2. Codex reviews for implementation feasibility
3. Gemini reviews for architecture and scope

Code review

1. Implementation agent produces the diff
2. Two other agents review independently
3. Codex synthesizes the combined review result

Reviewer Stance (mandatory)

Routing is not enough. A reviewer who agrees charitably produces false positives that cost more to fix later than the cold review saved. Every review prompt (plan, code, artifact) MUST:

1. Frame the reviewer as adversarial: "Assume the work has defects until proven otherwise."
2. Forbid praise and restatement — findings only.
3. Bias toward non-approval: APPROVE requires affirmative verification of each correctness-critical claim.
4. Require evidence: each finding cites a file path, plan section, or quoted claim.
5. Treat the work's own cited sources as claims to verify, not facts to trust.
6. Treat empty reviews as failures: if nothing is found, the prompt must make the reviewer list what was checked.

A review that returns APPROVE without a check-list is suspect — rerun with a stronger prompt.

Rationale: user feedback 2026-04-17 on #2323 — "Make all the reviews adversarial in nature. Helps maximize productivity."

Allowed Reductions

A narrower review is allowed ONLY when:

Condition	Allowed adjustment
User explicitly requests faster/lighter pass	Reduce to two-agent, document reason
Provider unavailable / quota exhausted	Continue with remaining, record missing reviewer
Purely clerical change (typo, comment)	Waive one reviewer with explicit note

Enforcement

• The pre-push review gate (scripts/enforcement/require-review-on-push.sh) checks for review markers
• Cross-review hook: .Codex/hooks/cross-review-gate.sh
• Compliance tracked by: scripts/enforcement/compliance-dashboard.sh

When to invoke this skill

• Before completing any implementation task
• Before pushing code to main
• When deciding review routing for a new task