review-spec

name	review-spec
description	Review a spec document against codebase reality, identifying gaps and ensuring sound, robust implementations.

Review the given spec and referenced codebase. Keep the review read-only.

Executable Path

For implementation plans where durable artifacts, provider selection, events, or reruns matter, prefer:

harness run plan-review --plan <path>

Use this direct skill when Harness is unavailable or a lightweight chat review is enough.

Authority

Apply this order:

1. Repository hard invariants and documented project intent.
2. The original source request and accepted task decisions: the goal, requirements, acceptance criteria, explicit boundaries, and decisions marked accepted, current, locked, or superseding. Apply the same authority to equivalent content within an artifact or handoff section clearly labeled as task or work-item authority.
3. Verified facts from the current repository and directly affected contracts.
4. Reviewer preferences and improvement opportunities.

Within an authority section, treat unmarked proposals, comments, and metadata as context. Other handoff content and summaries are also context, never authority.

Process

1. Read the plan, authority sources, and repository guidance.
2. Inspect the named files, symbols, contracts, and matching executor skills.
3. Trace each proposed change and test to acceptance, a hard invariant, or a verified risk.
4. Check every material design choice against current code and proportionality.
5. Return only material, evidence-backed findings.

Done when: every proposed change and major design choice has been checked against authority, code, and proportionality.

Plan Contract

Plans are decision records for capable, context-limited executors with repository access. Goal, Changes, Verify, and optional Boundaries are the default shape; equivalent headings are valid. Review content, not template completeness. Request detail only when it changes an executor decision or proves an acceptance criterion, hard invariant, or verified regression risk.

Trace every proposed change and test to acceptance, a hard invariant, or a verified risk. Unsupported work already proposed by the plan is a scope defect. Challenge unsupported assumptions, follow compatible existing patterns, and prefer the smaller equivalent plan.

Check these decisions only when the proposed change makes them material:

• When it replaces, redirects, splits, deprecates, or removes behavior, require the post-change owner, exact removals and cutover order, and required compatibility.
• When it changes failure handling, state or data flow, privacy, or security, require the intended behavior beside the affected change.

Delivery Shape

• For multi-unit work, prefer vertical slices where each unit completes one coherent, observable behavior across the boundaries it needs and can be verified when it lands. Prefer units that separate agents can own with limited overlap, that can proceed in parallel after the minimum shared setup, and that can be reviewed, landed, or rolled back independently.
• Challenge needlessly horizontal phases such as completing all persistence, then all services, then all interfaces when useful behavior could land end to end. Keep shared setup to the minimum required by the first slice and expand it only when a later slice proves the need.
• Accept a horizontal step when the plan gives a short, evidence-backed reason vertical delivery is impractical or unsafe, such as an indivisible migration, a cross-cutting safety fix, or the smallest shared prerequisite.
• Treat delivery shape as judgment, not a ban. Request restructuring only when the horizontal breakdown needlessly delays observable proof, prevents focused review, or creates avoidable dependency or collision risk.

Review Dimensions

Evaluate only relevant dimensions:

• Architecture: boundaries, data flow, API contracts, separation of concerns.
• Feasibility: complexity, technology trade-offs, effort, migration risk.
• Simplicity: overengineering, unnecessary phases, speculative abstractions, one-call-site abstractions, single-use workflows or registries, mergeable phases, and nice-to-haves without a named constraint.
• Project Alignment: documented audience, non-goals, invariants, source-of-truth boundaries, and current-versus-planned behavior.
• Reliability: error handling, retries, idempotency, degradation, partial failures.
• Performance: bottlenecks, caching, query patterns, scaling impact.
• Security: auth, data protection, validation, permissions, audit logging.
• Edge Cases: missing values or files, limits, timeouts, races, environment drift.
• Testing: prefer the highest existing stable seam proving acceptance; require a lower seam only for a distinct invariant or failure mode unobservable there. Use a focused behavioral check and the canonical repository gate without repetition.

Intent Source Gate

• When a known intent source or confirmed substitute exists, require the plan to preserve its material constraints.
• When product, architecture, boundary, public API, data or tenancy, provider, docs-architecture, or workflow-wide intent is unavailable, return blocked with the smallest exact human question needed to continue.
• Narrow bug fixes and local refactors may proceed without an intent source when the plan notes that none was found and makes no project-level direction or boundary decision.

Finding Contract

A finding may be must-fix only for:

• an accepted goal, criterion, decision, or boundary the plan omits or contradicts;
• work in the plan that cannot be traced to acceptance, an invariant, or a verified risk and would materially expand execution scope;
• a repository hard invariant the plan would violate;
• a verified correctness, security, reliability, or compatibility risk the plan would introduce; or
• a material executor decision or behavioral proof required to implement the accepted change safely.

Reviewer-proposed optional hardening, alternative architectures, preferences, nearby cleanup, and unrelated future work are outside this review and cannot block. Advisory findings may record material observations but must not require plan edits.

Use pass when there is no must-fix finding, needs_changes when a plan edit can resolve at least one must-fix finding, and blocked when required evidence or human intent is unavailable. For blocked, state the smallest exact missing evidence or human question; do not turn the uncertainty into a plan-edit request.

Output Format

harness run plan-review writes structured JSON matching schemas/review-output.schema.json: verdict, summary, and findings[] with title, severity, location, issue, recommendation, rationale, and must_fix. Return no extra fields.

For direct chat use, return each Markdown finding as:

### [Finding Title]

**Severity**: Critical | High | Medium | Low
**Location**: [Plan section, file, or path:line]
**Must fix**: Yes | No

**Issue**: [Clear problem description]
**Recommendation**: [Specific, actionable change]
**Rationale**: [Technical justification]

End with **Verdict**: Pass | Needs changes | Blocked. For Blocked, include the smallest exact missing evidence or human question.