Use when implementing, reviewing, verifying, or auditing work with subagents or delegated agents. Owns the deterministic controller protocol - pre-flight conflict scan, durable task briefs, exact base..head review packages, independent task review, mandatory fix and re-review of material findings, bounded repair budgets, a durable progress ledger, and a final independent whole-branch review - and routes each role to its contract, schema, and template.
Use when implementing, reviewing, verifying, or auditing work with subagents or delegated agents. Owns the deterministic controller protocol - pre-flight conflict scan, durable task briefs, exact base..head review packages, independent task review, mandatory fix and re-review of material findings, bounded repair budgets, a durable progress ledger, and a final independent whole-branch review - and routes each role to its contract, schema, and template.
activation
Activate when the description trigger applies to the current task.
required_inputs
Task request, relevant repository context, constraints, and authority dependencies.
required_outputs
Skill-specific artifact, verification evidence, canonical verdict, and next action.
Executed checks or an honest Unknown, Not Run, or Blocked state for every material claim.
Subagent Driven Development
Use this skill when work is delegated to one or more agents. First use skills/dispatching-parallel-agents/SKILL.md to decide whether dispatch is justified at all.
Subagents can produce evidence, patches, findings, and recommendations. They do not override APIVR, Elite Build Goals, source-of-truth order, or release gates.
A fix attempt does not clear a finding. A finding is CLEARED only after an independent re-review of the same scope.
Canonical Ownership
This file owns the controller state machine. The prompts, schemas, templates, and scripts below implement this contract and may not redefine it.
Resolve source of truth and APIVR tier
-> capture plan_base_sha
-> pre-flight conflict scan across all tasks and global constraints
-> present one consolidated conflict report
-> create durable task brief
-> capture task_base_sha before dispatch
-> implement test-first
-> implementer self-review and covering-test rerun
-> capture task_head_sha
-> generate exact base..head review package
-> independent task review
-> material findings enter the fix loop
-> fixer reruns named covering tests and records evidence
-> same scope receives independent re-review
-> update durable progress ledger
-> repeat for remaining tasks
-> independent final whole-branch review of plan_base_sha..branch_head_sha
-> APIVR verification and release-gate decision
1. Pre-Flight Conflict Scan
Run this before task 1. Do not dispatch any implementer until it completes.
Scan all tasks and global constraints for:
contradictory acceptance criteria;
duplicate edits to the same canonical file;
incompatible file ownership;
invalid or impossible test requirements;
sequencing and dependency conflicts;
overlapping task scopes;
incompatible preserved-behavior requirements;
conflicting support-level or adapter claims;
missing source-of-truth files;
requirements that would force an agent to guess.
Present one consolidated batch to the human. Record the outcome in preflight-conflict-report.md using 60_templates/PRE_FLIGHT_CONFLICT_REPORT_TEMPLATE.md. Unresolved material conflicts block implementation.
2. Task Brief
Every task gets a durable brief before dispatch. Use 60_templates/TASK_BRIEF_TEMPLATE.md or generate a starter brief with:
Exact requirements live in the brief. Do not paste them repeatedly into prompts. The brief is immutable after dispatch; a correction creates a new revision with a reason and timestamp.
3. Base And Head Capture
The controller records task_base_shabefore dispatch and task_head_sha when the implementer returns.
Generate the review package from that exact range:
Shortcut refs are prohibited. Never use HEAD~1 or any ~/^ form to derive a review range: it silently omits earlier commits in a multi-commit task. The helper rejects them, rejects an identical base and head, rejects a non-ancestor base, and rejects a dirty worktree unless --include-working-tree is explicitly given.
4. Implementer Statuses
Status
Meaning
Controller response
DONE
Scope complete, self-review done, covering tests rerun and recorded.
Send to independent task review.
DONE_WITH_CONCERNS
Complete, but risk, uncertainty, or partial evidence remains.
Review, and mark evidence Unknown, Not Run, or Blocked where applicable.
NEEDS_CONTEXT
Cannot continue without specific missing information.
Supply exact context or narrow scope. Never let the agent guess.
BLOCKED
Dependency, permission, evidence, or safety condition prevents progress.
Stop or reroute; record the blocker in the evidence ledger.
DONE is invalid without the self-review and covering-test evidence required by prompts/implementer-prompt.md.
5. Finding And Repair State Machine
Severities
BLOCKING · CRITICAL · IMPORTANT · MINOR · OBSERVATION
OPEN
-> FIXED_PENDING_REVIEW only after a fix report and covering-test evidence exist
-> CANNOT_VERIFY_FROM_DIFF when required evidence is outside the package
-> ACCEPTED_RISK only through explicit authorized disposition
FIXED_PENDING_REVIEW
-> CLEARED only after independent re-review of the same scope
-> OPEN when the re-review fails
-> BLOCKED when the repair budget is exhausted or evidence cannot be obtained
CANNOT_VERIFY_FROM_DIFF
-> OPEN when additional context reveals a defect
-> CLEARED only after additional evidence and re-review
-> BLOCKED when required evidence remains unavailable
Material-finding rule
Every BLOCKING, CRITICAL, or IMPORTANT finding must complete:
fix -> named covering tests -> recorded command and result -> same-scope independent re-review
A fix attempt does not clear a finding. A reviewer may not close a finding because a fix was attempted, described, or claimed.
Repair budget
Default maximum: three repair rounds per finding.
The task brief may set a lower or higher bound based on risk.
Exhausting the budget sets the task to BLOCKED and requires controller or human disposition.
The controller may not silently downgrade severity to escape the budget.
Uncertainty rule
CANNOT_VERIFY_FROM_DIFF maps to the existing evidence state Unknown. The controller must resolve each item using cross-task context before marking the task complete. Uncertainty may not disappear silently, and it blocks a final PASS under the existing rules in 10_governance/RELEASE_GATES.md until resolved or explicitly accepted.
6. Review Neutrality
Review prompts and packages may not:
tell the reviewer not to flag a category of valid issue;
assert that the implementation is correct before review;
pre-downgrade likely severity;
omit binding project constraints;
summarize a constraint in a way that changes its meaning.
Binding constraints are copied verbatim into the review package.
Reviewers must be independent of implementation. Where the runtime has no independent subagent, use the exact fallback in the active runtime manifest, and report the degraded independence explicitly. A fresh-context sequential pass is a substitute, not an equal.
7. Capability Selection
Use portable capability classes, not vendor model names.
Work
Minimum capability
Low-risk, narrow implementation
Standard implementer
Multi-file, stateful, security-sensitive, migration, integration, or architecture task
Advanced implementer
Task review
Equal to or stronger than the implementer, independent context
Critical repair review
Advanced reviewer
Final cumulative branch review
Strongest available reviewer
8. Context-Cost Control
Large plans, diffs, logs, and reports stay on disk. Controller messages carry paths and concise status only, not pasted content. This is a file-based handoff, and it is what makes long runs recoverable. See ARTIFACT_CONTRACT.md.
9. Final Whole-Branch Review
After every task-level review passes, run one independent review of the complete cumulative change: plan_base_sha..branch_head_sha.
This is APIVR Phase 4 at branch scope, not a seventh phase. It exists to catch cross-task defects that task-scoped reviewers structurally cannot see.
The final review package must contain: original plan; global constraints; plan base SHA; branch head SHA; cumulative diff and changed-file inventory; the progress ledger; all open, cleared, accepted-risk, and blocked findings; the task-level test matrix; final verification commands and results; unresolved implementer concerns; and rollback conditions.
Use prompts/final-reviewer-prompt.md and 60_templates/FINAL_BRANCH_REVIEW_TEMPLATE.md.
No APIVR completion or release claim may be made before this review passes, or an authorized non-critical risk is explicitly accepted.
After the final review and APIVR verification pass, load skills/finishing-a-development-branch/SKILL.md to decide merge, PR, keep, or discard behavior and any worktree cleanup.
10. Progress Ledger
Every task appends one entry to progress-ledger.jsonl (60_templates/PROGRESS_LEDGER_TEMPLATE.jsonl, schema schemas/progress-ledger.schema.json). The ledger is the recoverability artifact: it feeds 60_templates/EVIDENCE_LEDGER_TEMPLATE.md and 60_templates/COMPLETION_REPORT_TEMPLATE.md.
Two-Stage Task Review Gate
flowchart TD
A["Implementer returns status"] --> B{"DONE or DONE_WITH_CONCERNS?"}
B -- "No" --> C["Resolve NEEDS_CONTEXT or BLOCKED"]
B -- "Yes" --> D["Stage 1: Spec compliance review"]
D --> E{"Matches task brief and Elite Goals?"}
E -- "No" --> F["Open findings"]
E -- "Yes" --> G["Stage 2: Code quality and evidence review"]
G --> H{"Tests, safety, maintainability, evidence pass?"}
H -- "No" --> F
F --> I["Fix agent: fix, rerun named tests, record result"]
I --> J["Independent re-review of the SAME scope"]
J --> K{"Finding actually resolved?"}
K -- "No" --> L{"Repair budget exhausted?"}
L -- "No" --> I
L -- "Yes" --> M["BLOCKED: controller or human disposition"]
K -- "Yes" --> N["CLEARED"]
H -- "Yes" --> N
N --> O["Append progress-ledger entry"]
O --> P["Final independent whole-branch review"]
P --> Q["APIVR verdict and release gates"]
Stage 1 checks objective, scope, non-goals, preserved behavior, source-of-truth order, and acceptance criteria.
Stage 2 checks test-first evidence, code quality, security, data safety, rollback, observability, and release gates.
Worked Example
Scenario: a feature requires deployment changes, a webhook, and a dashboard update.
Controller captures plan_base_sha, runs the pre-flight scan, and finds that two tasks both edit the same route file. It presents the conflict and the human splits ownership.
Three task briefs are written. Each records its task_base_sha before dispatch.
The webhook implementer returns DONE_WITH_CONCERNS: provider sandbox verification is unavailable.
The exact base..head package is generated. The task reviewer opens one CRITICAL finding with file-and-line evidence, and marks provider verification CANNOT_VERIFY_FROM_DIFF.
The fix agent addresses the CRITICAL, reruns the named covering tests, records the command and result, and returns FIXED_PENDING_REVIEW. The same scope is re-reviewed and the finding becomes CLEARED.
The CANNOT_VERIFY_FROM_DIFF item maps to evidence state Unknown and remains open.
The final whole-branch review catches that the dashboard task weakened an assertion the webhook task depended on. That finding returns to the fix loop.
Release gates block production PASS while provider evidence is Unknown.
APIVR result: implementation can be complete while release remains blocked. That is the correct outcome, honestly reported.
Closeout
End with: APIVR tier, what was inspected, what changed, verification performed or marked Not Run / Blocked, the final verdict, and the single next required action.
