critique

name	critique
description	PR-first adversarial code review for Codex. Use after implementation or refactorpass on an open draft PR, especially when the user asks to critique, review hard, find bugs, or run the platform review chain. Posts verified findings inline before fixing, then replies and resolves. Lean mode runs the two highest-signal lanes; the deep matrix runs only when the resolved review tier is Deep.

Critique

Review an open draft PR adversarially. The goal is to catch bugs, missing tests, security issues, and convention violations while preserving every verified finding and disposition in the PR.

Context Window Check

Run this check before anything else. critique runs adversarial review lanes—two in lean mode, six core lanes in deep mode, plus a conditional tenant-coupling lane—each of which reads the diff, reads changed files, and produces structured findings. When subagents/delegation are available the lanes run in parallel, and each subagent inherits cache state from this session; when subagents are not available the lanes run as serial local passes that compete for the same context. Either way, if the current Codex session has already been heavily used for feature implementation, the lanes start with sharply reduced working windows and critique (especially critique deep) runs slower and more expensively.

Assess honestly:

• Has this session been writing/editing the feature about to be critiqued? Long conversation, many file edits, dense planning?
• Is the conversation about to brush against compaction territory?

If either is yes, briefly tell the user:

This session already contains substantial implementation context. A fresh Codex session may make the review lanes cheaper, but I can continue here if that is the authorized task.

This is cost and quality advice, not a workflow gate. Do not stop, defer the authorized task, or require a new session solely because context is heavy or compaction is approaching. Continue in the current session when the user has already authorized the review or asked you to proceed. Pause only when the user requested a fresh-session boundary, the runtime cannot continue safely, or a separate-session protocol transition requires another reviewer.

Stance Resolution

Resolve this engine's round number per .codex/references/local-review-ledger.md before selecting lanes: use $AGENT_LOOP_REVIEW_ROUND when the runner set it, take it from an invoking deepcritique, or count the local-review-pass:v3 and local-review-complete:v3 markers on the PR naming engine=codex and add one.

• Rounds 1–2 run adversarially. The stance, matrices, and fix bias below apply as written.
• Round 3 and later run in convergence mode. Both engines have read the change cold twice; the goal moves from challenging it to landing it. See "Convergence Rounds" below — it overrides the lane selection and the fix bias, and nothing else. The post-before-editing, reply, and resolve contract is unchanged, and the round cap does not move.

State the resolved round and stance in the output.

Adversarial Stance

Assume there are problems to find. Treat the diff as guilty until each risk is disproved by code, tests, or documented constraints. Actively look for the highest-impact failure modes first: data loss, security exposure, silent failure, broken public contracts, rollout breakage, and missing validation. Do not soften the search into a general quality pass.

Still keep the reporting bar high: only report specific, actionable findings with file/line evidence. If a suspected issue cannot be supported, dismiss it privately or list it as dismissed with the evidence that disproved it.

Disposition Bar

Treat validity and actionability as separate decisions. A technically real concern is not automatically worth changing the PR or growing the backlog.

Fix a confirmed finding only when the expected harm avoided clearly outweighs the churn and regression risk of the fix. Judge that from concrete evidence:

• how likely a user is to reach the failing path in normal or reasonably foreseeable use;
• the impact when they do, the number of users or systems exposed, and whether recovery is possible;
• confidence in the root cause and in the proposed correction; and
• the size, complexity, compatibility cost, and regression risk of the change.

For security findings, require a credible exploit path: identify the reachable boundary, attacker capability and preconditions, missing or bypassable control, and resulting impact. A theoretical weakness, generic hardening opportunity, or severity label without a plausible path to discovery and exploitation does not by itself justify churn.

Create a GitHub issue only for an urgent follow-up: a concrete, high-impact defect that is important enough to schedule within roughly the next two weeks, but whose safe fix should not land in this PR. Do not create issues for ordinary deferred backlog, speculative hardening, cleanup, or low-likelihood edge cases; record those as outcome=deferred with the no-issue rationale if already posted, or keep them out of the PR ledger when they do not clear the actionable finding bar.

Convergence Rounds

In round 3 and later, run only the lanes that can find a reason not to deploy: the code reviewer, the silent failure hunter, and the security reviewer when its signal is present. Drop the type/API design, comment/docs, PR test, and tenant-coupling lanes. They found what they were going to find in rounds 1–2, and they audit a surface that regenerates every time it is hardened — guaranteed to return work, guaranteed not to change what ships.

Brief those lanes exactly as an adversarial round does. They still report every evidence-backed finding with severity attached; the narrowing is a disposition rule applied when consolidating lane output, not an instruction to a lane to withhold what it found.

The actionability bar tightens further. Change the PR only for a blocking defect that also clears the Disposition Bar above — one that is realistically reachable and ships materially wrong behavior, loses or corrupts data, exposes a credible security or privacy exploit, breaks a public contract, or breaks deploy or rollout:

• Fix a blocking finding with the smallest edit that clears it. No refactor, no rename, no new abstraction, no test or comment hardening alongside it.
• Defer every confirmed non-blocking finding and resolve its thread. Create and link an issue only when it clears the urgent-follow-up bar above; otherwise reply with outcome=deferred and a concise no-issue rationale. Deferral is the expected disposition here, not an admission of scope creep.
• Dismiss invalid findings with evidence, exactly as in an adversarial round.

The findings a convergence round defers may still be real. Fixing them in this PR is the wrong call when the expected benefit does not justify moving the head and re-staling the other engine's attestation. Land the change; let only urgent follow-ups grow the backlog.

A convergence round that finds no blocking defect ends the loop: post the clean-pass attestation, recommend the repository's ship step, and list any urgent deferred issues.

Mode

Mode follows the resolved review tier, not the caller's habit. The tier triggers and the evidence rules live in ../../REVIEW_WORKFLOW.md under "Review Tier" and are the only definition; this skill does not carry its own list. Lean is the default; Deep is the exception you justify.

Resolve the effective local-review-tier:v1 marker under the ledger's authenticated, forward-only transition rule. If none exists, classify against the workflow doc's triggers and post the marker before starting a lane. Lean is the tier when no trigger matches.

• Lean: the default. Run the lean two-lane review: code reviewer plus silent failure hunter. This is still an adversarial PR review, not a casual skim.
• Deep: run the full independent review matrix below only when the recorded tier is Deep. A deep argument handed down from deepcritique asserts that recorded tier; a direct human deep request is trigger 6 and posts a Deep replacement marker that preserves the recorded triggers and adds 6 before lanes start. Deep mode is intentionally much heavier than lean mode; do not collapse it into one general review pass.

Escalate mid-pass only on a confirmed finding that reaches a trigger, per the workflow doc's evidence rule, and post the replacement marker naming it. A suspicion is not evidence. State the resolved tier and the trigger that selected it in the output.

The tenant-coupling lane catches one customer's values hardcoded into shared logic and is intentionally not part of the lean two-lane set. A diff that materially changes customer/tenant-variable application behavior — vendor integrations, branching or transformation driven by per-tenant configuration, prompt/output generation, or data normalization — trips trigger 1's isolation clause and is classified there rather than by a separate recommendation here. A deployment-only value or reference to an existing runtime secret is not enough unless the diff changes how that value is selected, authorized, transformed, exposed, or stored.

Lane Execution Ownership

Review lanes are read-only analysis workers. Every spawned lane prompt must say that the lane may inspect source, diffs, existing tests, and existing CI results, but must not run test suites, linters, formatters, builds, coverage, package installation, or CI polling. If dynamic evidence is necessary, the lane returns the smallest proposed probe to the orchestrator instead of executing it.

The orchestrator owns command execution. After all lanes finish, deduplicate and verify their hypotheses, apply any fixes, then run one consolidated validation pass against the final head. Do not multiply the same validation across parallel lanes.

Lean Review Matrix

Lean mode must cover two independent lanes:

1. Code reviewer — correctness bugs, regressions, edge cases, broken contracts, project conventions, and meaningful test gaps.
2. Silent failure hunter — swallowed errors, partial failures, async races, retries, timeouts, idempotency, and missing observability for critical paths.

Run these lanes as independently as the active runtime permits:

• If subagents/delegation are available and permitted by the active Codex instructions, spawn independent reviewers for both lanes using the ledger's immutable review packet and scoped diff-delivery contract. Keep the packet prefix byte-identical, append only the lens and exact file scope, use no inherited conversation history when supported, and impose a concise output ceiling. Tell each reviewer to return only actionable findings with file/line evidence and avoid relying on conclusions from the other lane.
• If subagents are unavailable or not permitted, perform two separate local passes using the lane prompts above. Do not present that as equivalent to independent subagents.
• If lean mode was requested but independent subagents could not be used, explicitly say so in the output under review depth.

Deep Review Matrix

Deep mode must cover six core independent lanes, plus the conditional tenant-coupling lane when its signal is present:

1. Code reviewer — correctness bugs, regressions, edge cases, and broken contracts.
2. Silent failure hunter — swallowed errors, partial failures, async races, retries, timeouts, idempotency, and observability gaps.
3. Type/API design analyzer — public API shape, type soundness, compatibility, dependency boundaries, and versioning drift.
4. Comment/docs analyzer — misleading comments, stale docs, migration instructions, public/private information leaks, and docs that overpromise behavior.
5. PR test analyzer — missing tests, weak assertions, CI gaps, fixture realism, and whether validation actually exercises the risk.
6. Security reviewer — auth, secrets, injection, supply-chain, workflow permissions, sensitive-data exposure, and fail-closed behavior.
7. Tenant-coupling reviewer (conditional) — literals or branches that encode one customer's data, configuration, or vocabulary into shared logic. For every suspicious value ask: would this still be correct for a second customer with different values? If not, move the value to configuration/data with a safe default. Ignore genuinely universal protocol constants, standard enums, and framework keys.

Run these lanes as independently as the active runtime permits:

• Invoking critique deep is an explicit request to use independent subagents for every applicable lane whenever the active runtime exposes subagent/delegation tools. Do not require the user to separately say "use subagents" before spawning those lane reviewers.
• If subagents/delegation are available and permitted by the active Codex instructions, spawn independent reviewers using the ledger's immutable review packet and scoped diff-delivery contract. Keep the packet prefix byte-identical, append only the disjoint lens and exact file scope, use no inherited conversation history when supported, and impose a concise output ceiling. Tell each reviewer to return only actionable findings with file/line evidence and avoid relying on conclusions from other lanes.
• If subagents are unavailable or not permitted, perform a separate local pass for every applicable lane using the prompts above. Do not present that as equivalent to independent subagents.
• If deep mode was requested but independent subagents could not be used, explicitly say so in the output under review depth.
• Run the tenant-coupling lane as a separate use of the code-reviewer role with the narrow prompt above; do not dilute it into the general correctness lane.

Process

1. Load .codex/references/local-review-ledger.md. 1a. Take the pass telemetry snapshot before reading or classifying anything, per .codex/REVIEW_WORKFLOW.md "Pass Telemetry". The reading and classification the steps below do is part of what the pass costs, so a snapshot taken later would quietly under-report it. The helper is a no-op when extraction is not enabled for this repository, and it reports the separate emission gate that decides whether this pass may publish a record at all.

2. Resolve the PR number, verify it is open and its head is the current branch, and require local HEAD, remote head, and PR head to match. If the branch has no PR, push it and open a draft PR before reviewing.

3. Read every prior review thread, including resolved and outdated threads, once at the orchestrator level before inspecting the current PR diff. Telemetry markers are not review context: exclude them by marker prefix and never carry them into a lane prompt or packet. When the caller supplies a pinned base SHA, resolve the reviewed head, changed-file list, and stat once, then build the ledger's immutable packet using the same literal <base-sha>..<head-sha> range for every lane. Do not make each lane reload the PR ledger.

4. Skip docs/config-only changes unless the user explicitly wants review. A skip finalizes its v3 result and then emits a skipped telemetry record: it still spent tokens reading and classifying the PR, and that overhead is worth seeing.

5. Read AGENTS.md and relevant path-specific instructions. Assign every lane the exact changed paths its lens needs, and have it pull path-scoped diffs per the ledger instead of receiving one pasted or stored whole diff.

6. Resolve the round and stance per "Stance Resolution". In a convergence round, the lane list in "Convergence Rounds" replaces steps 7 and 8, and its inverted fix bias replaces step 10. Every other step, including step 9, is unchanged.

7. In lean mode, execute every lane in the Lean Review Matrix. Load these role references for lane prompts:

   • .codex/references/roles/code-reviewer.md
   • .codex/references/roles/silent-failure-hunter.md Keep lane findings separated until both lanes complete, then deduplicate by root cause.

8. In deep mode, execute every lane in the Deep Review Matrix. Load these role references for lane prompts:

   • .codex/references/roles/code-reviewer.md
   • .codex/references/roles/silent-failure-hunter.md
   • .codex/references/roles/type-design-analyzer.md

Output

Reporting this pass's own measured spend is permitted; reading any earlier pass's telemetry record is not.

End with:

• round and stance: <n> plus adversarial or convergence
• review depth: lean with independent subagents, lean local two-pass fallback, deep with independent subagents, or deep local multi-pass fallback
• findings fixed
• findings deferred (with an issue link only for urgent follow-ups) or dismissed (with one-line evidence)
• validation run
• PR number, reviewed head, comments posted, replies posted, and threads resolved
• the next step under .codex/REVIEW_WORKFLOW.md: hand back to the relay for the declared reviewers that have not attested this head — in auto mode run only the tested launcher matching each missing declared reviewer (defaulting to Agy only when declaring a new relay), in handoff mode post local-review-handoff:v1 and stop — and add reviewit <pr> / reviewit <pr> deep whenever a hosted pass is wanted. When recommending reviewit, recommend a fresh session; the current one has absorbed critique findings, fix commits, and (in deep mode) the full review matrix.