checking-restraint

name	checking-restraint
description	Reviews changes for over-engineering — premature abstraction, speculative generality, the wrong abstraction, and premature optimization without a profile. The restraint / brake-pedal lens. Use when a change adds abstraction layers, config knobs, generality, or hand-optimized code, or when asking whether a change is doing too much.
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checking-restraint

Is this change too much? Premature abstraction or optimization — the brake pedal.

When to use

Reviews changes for over-engineering — premature abstraction, speculative generality, the wrong abstraction, and premature optimization without a profile. The restraint / brake-pedal lens. Use when a change adds abstraction layers, config knobs, generality, or hand-optimized code, or when asking whether a change is doing too much.

Shape: diff — design-capable. Also works on design docs and plans: apply the same checks to the proposed states, data flows, and failure paths before any code exists. When the design doc is specifically a decision record (an ADR, RFC, or adoption/deprecation plan), also run the shared decision-record checklist on top of this lens's own topical checks: is the rationale actually recorded (not just the outcome); are the stated assumptions still current; is there a revisit-trigger; is an exit, rollback, or sunset path defined; were real alternatives weighed, not just the chosen option justified after the fact? A gap here is this lens's finding, reported the same way as a topical one — not a separate report.

Reviewer discipline

Report only real problems. If the code correctly handles the case, reply "No findings" and stop — do not invent issues. This guards against false positives on correct code; still report every genuine issue you do find, with its full detail.

Defects are the default; improvements are opt-in. By default this lens is defect-only: do not suggest changes to code that is already correct. When the team has opted up into improvement suggestions, a finding on already-correct code is admissible only as nit-severity, route: implementer (the author applies, defers, or ignores), and must clear the non-configurable anti-churn floor: it must genuinely improve — never offer a merely equivalent alternative — and must converge (once a dimension is as good as you can confidently make it, stop; never oscillate A→B then B→A, never re-order to an equivalent state). Defects keep the strict bar above regardless of this setting.

Team preferences. If the reviewed repo has .code-quality-atlas/preferences.md, apply it before reporting: a repo's .code-quality-atlas/preferences.md may set/tune this lens's thresholds or selection, and — being preference-tier — may suppress one of its findings outright (it never surfaces). Its improvement-valence directive is also what decides whether the "opted up" improvement-suggestion behavior above is active for this review. Absent the file, apply this lens's defaults exactly as written above.

Pre-existing defects in touched code are surfaceable, not yours to fix. When you notice a genuine defect this change did not introduce but that sits in the code this PR actually touches — the edited function or immediately adjacent lines — you may surface it, tagged "pre-existing — not introduced by this change." Like improvements it is opt-in and default-quiet (off unless the team opts up), route: implementer, and non-blocking: it informs the author's fix-now / file-a-ticket / ignore call and never sets this PR's verdict, because the diff did not cause it. Stay scoped to code the change touches — a repo-wide hunt is the audits' job, not this review — and never let it expand the PR's scope.

Top checks

The head of the full checklist — enough for a first pass without opening any reference file:

• Is this abstraction introduced on real, repeated need (rule of three), or speculatively for one/two uses (YAGNI)?
• Does it have a single, nameable responsibility — or is it a grab-bag taking flags/conditionals to fit multiple callers (the wrong-abstraction smell)?
• Is there an existing abstraction this duplicates/competes with (reuse/extend it, don't fork — cross #8)?
• Would inlining make the code clearer? If the abstraction fights its callers, recommend re-inlining.
• Is the indirection earning its keep, or a shallow wrapper that just adds a layer to read through (Ousterhout)?
• Any speculative generality: config options, plugin hooks, "just in case" parameters with a single caller? Remove.
• Is there a loop that issues a query/RPC/HTTP call per iteration? (N+1.) Push to a single batched/IN/join query or a bulk endpoint. Flag await inside for over independent items.
• What is the worst-case complexity on the hot path as input grows? Flag accidental O(n²) (nested loops over the same collection, Array.includes inside a loop → use a Set/Map), and unbounded growth.

Shared categories: category #15 checks are shared with reviewing-performance-and-efficiency (their primary owner). When both lenses run on the same change, report each shared finding once, under the primary owner.

Mechanizing these checks

Where a finding here is one a tool can catch deterministically, surface that as an advisory route: implementer note next to the finding: the hand review caught it this time, and wiring the matching tool from reference/tool-rules.md into CI gates it going forward. This is a suggestion to mechanize, not a defect — it never blocks a verdict, and it falls away on a repo that already runs the tool.

Process notes. If this lens misfired on this change — flagged correct code, missed an obvious issue squarely in its own scope, or its checklist didn't fit the change shape — say so in one line under synthesizing-review-findings's Process notes appendix; that is not a defect finding. Say nothing if the lens worked as intended — never invent a process note to fill the section.

Going deeper

• reference/heuristics.md — the full checklist; open it when the change sits squarely in this lens's domain.
• examples.md — concrete good/bad findings, and the output format to match.
• reference/tool-rules.md — static-analysis rules covering the mechanical subset; for wiring up linters, not needed for the judgment review itself.
• reference/sources.md — the research behind each check; for provenance, not needed during a review.