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Use when about to call complex or shippable work done, or before merging.
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Based on SOC occupation classification
| name | independent-review-gate |
| description | Use when about to call complex or shippable work done, or before merging. |
Your own review and a green test suite are not enough. You're invested in the approach, so you read past your own mistakes, and the tests only cover what you already thought to check. Before calling complex work done, have someone or something with no stake review the whole change.
A fresh set of eyes catches the defect that's obvious in hindsight and invisible to you.
This is the non-optional version of superpowers' requesting-code-review: the review is not a step to skip when the suite is green, because the green suite is exactly what can't be trusted alone — and the fix you make after the review gets re-reviewed too.
Finishing a feature or a spec. Before merging. Before claiming "done" on anything non-trivial, or anything that ships to other people.
Hand the full diff to an independent reviewer with explicit angles to check: correctness, edge cases, the branches no test touches, backward compatibility. Fix the blockers and cover each one with a test. Then re-review the fix itself — a second pass catches the inverted-fix mistake faster than a new test would.
The green suite is not the gate. The independent verdict is.
Your change to a payment client passes all 200 tests and your own read-through. A reviewer with fresh eyes notices that one branch — the error path no test covers — has an inverted condition: it retries on success and gives up on failure.
The suite was green because it only ran the happy path. Your own review missed it because you "knew" what the code was meant to do, so you read what you intended instead of what you wrote.
The independent pass caught it before users did.
| Thought | Reality |
|---|---|
| "Tests pass, so it's done" | Tests only cover what you thought to test. |
| "I already reviewed it myself" | You can't see your own blind spot. |
| "It's obviously correct" | The expensive bugs always look obvious until they bite. |
Use when about to show any prose a human will read - docs, README, commit bodies, UI copy, store text.
Use when building any mechanic that could fail on a machine out of reach - a shipped product, a CLI a user runs, a server.
Use when doing any work in a project that has the instincts plugin installed
Use when touching build scripts, release or packaging steps, publish flows, or CI config.
Use when about to build something someone proposed, especially when the proposer sounds confident and the idea sounds obviously fine.
Use when adding any cross-cutting change - a new gate, limit, permission check, or rule that must apply everywhere.
