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review-panel

What it does

review-panel reviews the one PR that takes an epic's integration branch to main. It first takes the spec and Coherence verdicts from review-pr's full-epic mode (do the slices agree on the interfaces they shared?), then runs several reviewer personas over the same diff in parallel: correctness, testing, maintainability, standards and invariants, and history always, plus security, reliability, adversarial, data-migration and API-contract when the diff warrants them. It merges their findings under one severity and confidence scale, numbers them F1, F2, and writes one report ending in MERGE, FIX FIRST or HUMAN DECISION.

It never edits code, never merges, and never posts the report until you say so.

When to reach for it

Type /review-panel <pr#>, or the agent reaches for it when a PR to main needs a panel. build-epic calls it for its integration-branch PR. On a slice PR it stops and points to review-pr: a panel on a slice costs several times as much and finds mostly noise.

Common questions

Why are findings numbered F1 and not #1? GitHub turns a bare #1 in a comment into a link to issue or PR 1, so a report posted as a comment linked to unrelated work.

A finding says ticket-mandated. What do I do with it? A ticket told the worker to do something the rubric calls a defect, and the panel reports it anyway so the decision is yours. One case is exempt: a narrowing that the epic's plan comment lists under Narrowed: was approved when to-tickets cut the plan, so the panel judges that behaviour as narrowed and not as missing.

Does it check our ADRs and invariants? Yes: the standards-and-invariants persona reads CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, CONTEXT.md, the coding standards and every ADR, and flags where the diff breaks one. Candidate new ADRs and terminology drift go into close-epic's Learnings.

It's working if

  • The persona set is announced, with a reason for each conditional one, before any reviewer runs.
  • The report has one verdict, findings with F numbers, file and line, and a Coverage section saying what was dropped and why.
  • Nothing is posted to the PR until you approve it.

Where it fits

review-panel is the main gate of the SDD chain, after build-epic finishes the slices and before you merge to main; close-epic follows the merge. ask-syn54x routes the whole set.