orc-judge

name

orc-judge

description

Judgment gates for the ORC ultra lane. One judge skill, one agent (orc-judge-opus-5-xhigh), three dispatch contexts: gate=analysis (after the analyst), gate=plan (after the planner), gate=implementation (after verify — the anti-miss-implementation fidelity + strict-quality gate). Returns a structured verdict (APPROVE | REVISE | ESCALATE) with anchored, consequence-cited findings; REVISE loops the author with a hard 2-loop cap and a convergence rule. Dispatched only from /orc-ultra — no slash command of its own, never in orc or orc-mini. The orchestrator dispatches the judge subagent — it never judges itself.

ORC-JUDGE (ultra-lane judgment gates)

A model-based quality gate on top of ORC's deterministic gates. The judge handles what determinism cannot: scope-interpretation correctness, plan soundness, implementation fidelity, and — at the final gate — ultra-strict code quality. Deterministic gates ALWAYS run first; the judge never re-checks what a string-compare catches.

Ultra lane ONLY. No /orc-judge command; the orchestrator dispatches orc-judge-opus-5-xhigh at the three ultra gates.

Hard rules

1. The orchestrator never judges — it spawns. One agent, three contexts (gate=analysis|plan|implementation).
2. Deterministic first. A judge dispatch is only legal AFTER the gate's deterministic checks passed (evidence spot-check + derivation lint / coverage + graph checks / verify + traceability matrix + static analysis).
3. The judge is read-only and blind to the author's internal reasoning or self-assessment (anti-anchoring): it sees the artifact, its evidence, the advisor brief + rubric, and the original request.
4. Judge gates ADD to user sign-offs, never replace them. Gate approvals never skip the analyst challenge round or the plan sign-off.
5. Gate scope is one-directional. gate=plan takes the approved spec as fixed ground truth; gate=implementation takes the approved plan as fixed — no gate re-litigates an earlier approved gate.
6. The judge never fixes. Authors fix: analyst (gate=analysis), planner (gate=plan), a scored executor fix wave (gate=implementation).

Verdict handling (orchestrator side)

Validate the return against the agent's verdict contract, then:

• Downgrade enforcement: any blocking finding missing its verbatim anchor or its class-appropriate justification (failure_consequence for correctness/security; named category + concrete alternative for smell/simplification/placement) → downgrade to advisory and tell the user. EXCEPTION: a security finding with a concrete consequence is always blocking — never downgraded.
• APPROVE → record the verdict artifact, continue the pipeline.
• REVISE → re-dispatch the author with the original slice + the blocking findings verbatim. The author's return must echo finding_id → resolution per finding; a missing echo is a malformed return (requeue). Then RE-JUDGE under the convergence rule: block only on unresolved prior findings by id or on lines the revision changed; new findings on untouched material are advisory-only. Hard cap: 2 revision loops per gate, counted in the checkpoint.
• ESCALATE (or a third failure) → present the ESCALATE menu: accept-and-proceed (unresolved findings recorded in the Phase 7 summary) / user fixes manually then re-judge (does not consume a loop) / grant one extra loop / stop-and-checkpoint.
• Advisory findings NEVER loop — they ride forward attached to the next phase's slices as notes.
• Persist every verdict as run/{run-slug}/ultra/verdict-<gate>-<round>.md (mined by /orc-retro; survives resume). When logging, emit JUDGE <gate> <verdict> and the judgment GATE line (pass|bounce|escalate).

The three gates

Gate	After	Judges	REVISE target
analysis	analyst-return deterministic gates	scope interpretation, requirement coherence, rubric misses, stale-doc risk	analyst
plan	Phase 1 exit gate + blast-radius map	decomposition, declared-file plausibility, deps, right-sizing, blast-radius coverage	planner
implementation	Phase 6/6.5 + traceability matrix + static analysis	fidelity to the user's ask + ultra-strict quality (security, smells, simplification, placement, pattern invariants)	scored executor fix wave → re-verify → re-judge

Return fields include actual_model + actual_effort (standard claimed-vs-actual check) and rubric_items_checked[] + unconfirmed_assumptions_touched[] — validate them like any worker return.