gstack/docs/review-policy.md

Review policy: how gstack's reviews converge

This is the canonical statement of what a gstack review may block on, how the /ship review loop converges, and what the ship receipt records about it. The skills (/review, /ship) and the tools (gstack-review-scope, gstack-ship-receipt) implement it; a team's own rules should point here instead of restating it. A one-line crew rule is enough:

Review convergence: gstack review policy (docs/review-policy.md), scope knob default.

The blocking floor

A finding is blocking when it is a CRITICAL defect: it would fail a test, break production, or lose data or secrets. Everything else is below the floor: an advisory, an informational item, a test finding (category testing: a gap, a weak or flaky test), a wording or naming note, a style or simplification suggestion. Below-floor findings are reported, never fixed after pass 1 of a ship, and never earn another review pass.

Three words cover every finding, and the loop budgets by them: a blocker is the intended case gone wrong (the floor above); a should is a real bug a caller will hit inside the intended case (fixed when it is in the diff on pass 1, deferred when it is not); a nit is the rest (a named note). Two stop rules follow: if a pass's fixes grew the diff past what the request needs, cut that growth first; and the cap approves nothing, so a standing blocker is reported, never waved through.

Before a merged finding counts, the parent applies lead judgment (review/sections/review-army.md, ship/sections/review-army.md, stage 4 of the merge): a reviewer whose whole return is nits found nothing; a defect names the call site or input that reaches it, or it is a note; structure for a case nothing takes is advisory; "I would have done it differently" is not a finding; a finding that assumes a rule the repository documents otherwise is dropped with the pointer. Independent agreement between reviewers is the strongest signal.

Every reviewer prompt gstack dispatches (the core checklist, each specialist, the Red Team, the outside voice) carries this definition: CRITICAL means the floor above; everything else is INFORMATIONAL. Data loss, a trust-boundary bypass and uncapped spend stay forced CRITICAL (the sideways sweep rule); no lane, specialist, dedup or saved decision downgrades them.

Rulings below the floor

The floor is a test, and these classes have been put to it, each more than once, and failed it (#3485 from the /ship of #3484, #3504 from the /ship of #3487). A finding in one of them is a note from the first pass on, named by its ruling in the PR body's ## Review notes; it never earns a fix round or another review pass, and the lead judgment stage drops it from the defect count with the pointer. The floor itself does not move, so a finding that also loses data, crosses a trust boundary or spends without a cap stays CRITICAL whatever class it resembles.

Ruling	What it looks like	Why it is below the floor
own-artifact hardening	A check missing between two things the repository's own tooling writes: a screen verdict not compared with the receipt it belongs to; a receipt schema that does not declare a key the writer records; a policy loader that defaults when the base branch's own file is invalid; a size read that follows a symlink inside the repository.	The only writer is the repository's maintainers through its tools; no caller inside the intended case reaches the gap, and no test fails. A writer outside that trust boundary makes it a bypass, and CRITICAL.
unwired or unread	A helper with no caller, a field written and never read, a duplicated helper, a header comment naming a step that does not run it, a key-version constant that moved before any release carried the old value.	Nothing takes the path, so nothing breaks; it is dead code to delete or wire in its own change.
bounded repeat work	A re-dispatch on every call, a redundant screen after main moves, an orphaned scratch branch, a refusal that could come one step earlier in the sequence, a settle that could wait one more check.	The operation completes, nothing is lost, and the cost is one more bounded run; uncapped spend is the sideways sweep's CRITICAL, not this class.
conservative refusal	Stale state scoped wider than its cause: a RED verdict that keeps refusing a head after main moved, a pending result that keeps refusing after it settled.	A refusal costs a rerun and never passes something wrong; a wrong pass would be the floor.
artifact presentation	A string from an artifact printed verbatim into a parsed line (whitespace, control characters); a classifier that reads a non-zero exit code beside a non-RED verdict as RED.	Display and classification of the repository's own output; it forges no parsed field.
test gap	A state-matrix cell without a test, a coverage percentage, a weak or flaky test, a fixture that shares the coordinator's environment.	Category testing, below the floor by definition above; a gap is work for the test audit, not a defect in the diff. Precedence for state machines: the specialist still reports each untested cell CRITICAL so gstack-state-matrix check proves the matrix complete, and gstack-state-matrix findings maps it to INFORMATIONAL per matrix cell before the merge; a wrong row or collapsed kinds stays CRITICAL, and a cell with a second finding keeps both.

A reviewer that wants a class promoted argues it against the floor with a reaching input, in the finding, and the owner rules; the table records the rulings, it does not close them.

NO FINDINGS is a result

A reviewer that finds nothing answers NO FINDINGS and nothing else. That is a completed, clean result, never a failed review and never a reason to invent an item to show work. Missing or unusable reviewer output is the opposite: incomplete coverage, which blocks until the reviewer is rerun.

How /ship converges (review_scope: frozen, the default)

1. Pass 1 reviews the whole diff against the merge base. Every finding goes through gstack-review-scope classify, which stamps it with locus (diff: a hunk the PR changed, with three lines of context; outside: anything else), kind, blocking and scope. Findings in the diff are fix. A blocking finding in code the PR did not change is defer: gstack-review-scope defer files it as a GitHub issue (one per finding, reused across reruns through an <!-- gstack-deferred-finding: <fingerprint> --> marker; the issue text is scanned like the PR body before anything is posted, so a finding that quotes a secret is unfiled (publication scan refused: …); unfiled (<reason>) when gh is unavailable or its search fails; every unfiled case still exits 0) and the PR body lists it under ## Deferred findings. A finding's cause (the changed line behind a defect reported elsewhere, a deleted file included) places it in the diff. Below-floor findings outside the diff are note, listed under ## Review notes.
2. What comes next is the transition table below, not "any fix earns another pass". A full pass after pass 1 reviews only the range since the previous pass: each pass saves its head, the next diffs RANGE_BASE..HEAD for every reviewer (the gate scan and QA probes keep the whole candidate) and classifies with --range-base. Only a blocking finding in that range or in the diff is fix; every below-floor finding is a note.
3. Two full passes is the cap, plus at most one fix-check; a scoped pass (below) is a full pass. A blocking finding still open after the last allowed step stops the run and names the finding (path, severity, problem) for the owner; a third full pass is the owner's call, never the loop's. The cap approves nothing.

Transitions

gstack-review-plan (lib/review-depth.ts nextStep) owns this table, and /ship asks it after every step:

The step that just finished	Next
none	full pass 1 on the whole diff
a full pass with no edits	done
a full pass that fixed a blocking finding, below the cap, on a diff below full depth with a fix range of at most 150 runtime lines	scoped pass on the range
a full pass that fixed a blocking finding, below the cap (full depth, a larger range, or a range or depth it could not read)	full pass on the range
a full pass whose fix touched a gate-class path, below the cap	full pass on the range
a full pass that fixed only below-floor findings	one fix-check
a full pass at the cap that fixed a blocking finding	one fix-check
a full pass that leaves a blocking finding open (fixed or not)	stop: name it for the owner
a fix-check that found nothing blocking (below-floor fixes before it included)	done
a fix-check that found a blocking finding	stop: name it for the owner

A fix-check is one reviewer reading the touched hunks, the fix list, the test results and the callers of every changed symbol, at full effort. It is logged as a review-fix-check row, so it never counts as a pass. No army, no Red Team and no outside voice run on it.

A scoped pass is pass 2 after a blocking fix when pass 1 and the diff both ran below full depth (no gate class, no depth error, no --depth-floor full). A full pass 1 always gets a full pass 2: --pass1-depth carries pass 1's REVIEW_DEPTH, and an absent flag counts as full. The fix range RANGE_BASE..HEAD must have at most SCOPED_RANGE_LINES (150) runtime lines, counted as the depth counts them (gstack-review-plan --range-base $PASS_HEAD prints FIX_RANGE:). It dispatches one fix-check on the range, the Red Team on the range, the native adversarial pass when the range changes runtime lines, every force-included specialist and the outside voice when published numbers changed. Step 11's voices that have not run yet stay listed, as on a full pass 2. It writes a full-pass review row with "scope":"scoped", so it counts toward the cap, and a blocker it leaves open stops for the owner as before. A fix that touched a gate-class path (read from the range with its own scope and gate scan), a larger range, an empty range, or a range, classifier or depth it cannot read keeps the full pass 2. The 150-line figure is a starting value from a 24-PR backtest (GSTA-152 D6), to revisit once classified findings carry raised_by.

The same floor and the same NO FINDINGS rule apply to /review on its own; its re-review loop keeps its three-cycle fix cap (CYCLES), and a pass that applies no edits is its exit too.

Review depth by diff class

gstack-review-plan --base <base> classifies the diff, picks a depth and prints the reviewers the next step dispatches: REVIEW_CLASS:, REVIEW_DEPTH: <d> runtime_lines=<n> rules=<hash> reasons=<…> codes=<…>, GATE_SCAN: tagged=<n>|unavailable head=<sha>, one DEPTH_ERROR: per input that failed closed, one DISPATCH: per reviewer with its effort and a shell-quoted DIFF_CMD: (plus DIFF_EXCLUDE: <name> none when it reads everything), one SKIP: per reviewer left out, and --json with the same fields. A plan that fails closed to full exits 0; a diff git cannot list exits 1.

Classes are unchanged. A mixed diff takes its most restrictive class: docs (markdown no agent or gate reads), tests (test files and fixtures), code (everything else, including every SKILL.md and template, markdown in a skill directory, */sections/**, scripts/resolvers/**, rule docs, checklists and bins) and gate (code plus auth or migration scope, a hunk the gate scan tags, a deleted code or test path, CI workflows, credential, state-root and the paths below).

Runtime lines are the changed lines of code-class paths, minus outputs the base commit's .gstack/generated.json registers. Docs, tests and release metadata are never runtime; a .tmpl edit plus its regenerated SKILL.md counts the template once.

Data files no code names are docs. A changed or deleted JSON, JSONL, NDJSON, CSV, TSV or raster image (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, ICO, AVIF) counts as docs when no non-docs file names its basename at the head, at the merge base or, for live /ship, in the working tree with untracked files; a data file named only by another data file follows that file, four files deep. Precedence: agent prose (.gstack/**), a test or fixture path, a gate path, a config file (.github/**, anything under a config/ directory, dotfiles, *.config.*, package.json, lockfiles, tsconfig*.json, manifest.json and the other tool manifests lib/review-depth.ts lists) and a named consumer each keep the path code, and YAML, TOML and SVG are always code. More than 2,000 data paths keep every one code; a git grep failure is consumer_scan_failed and fails the depth closed. Only classifyDiff applies the rule (lib/review-collect.ts finds the consumers, gstack-ship-preflight's RUNTIME_LINES reads the same function); every path-only caller (the receipt's gate-scan decision, the Step 16 post-review route, /autoplan's docs-only scope) keeps data files code. A numeric claim in a data file still schedules the outside voice.

Depth	When	Pass 1 dispatches
light, runtime 0	docs and tests only, or only registered outputs	the core checklist only; the outside voice when the diff publishes numbers
light, runtime 1–50	SMALL_DIFF_LINES or fewer runtime lines	core, one batched specialist (the batched checklists below plus the Red Team prompt in one context), the native adversarial pass (kept: backtest inconclusive, GSTA-147 D5) and the outside voice on numbers
standard	more than 50 runtime lines	one batched specialist at medium and the Red Team at 200 runtime lines (or on a CRITICAL); the batched reader leaves docs and registered outputs out of its diff; adversarial and outside voice read everything
full	gate class, or any classifier error	one batched specialist on the whole diff, the Red Team always, no hit-rate gating

Batched checklists (the lean ensemble, GSTA-167 part 2). One specialist subagent reads Testing and Security on every code or gate diff, plus State-machines, Data-migration, API-contract and Design when scope asks (a forced checklist always joins). Maintainability, Performance and Simplification are read only when forced (SKIP: names them). The Red Team reads the batched reader's merged findings. A free re-score of saved C and D findings lost 0 of the 29 blockers (handoffs/GSTA-167/lean-ensemble-rescore.md); the live round 5 replay passed (L∘G1 found 24 of 29 blockers against the control's 21, handoffs/GSTA-167/noloss5-results.md).

A fixed blocking finding, a CRITICAL or an open blocker raises a light diff to standard for the next step (step=standard): its specialists read at least 50 lines and the Red Team runs, so a raise never dispatches less than light did. When the next step is a scoped pass, the raise applies to the scoped set only. A fix-check is the same at every depth.

Fail closed. Each of these makes the depth full and is listed in errors[] with the input it could not read, a sanitized cause and the repair: a gstack-diff-scope error, a gate scan that is unavailable, a base registry that cannot be read or is invalid (REGEN_REGISTRY_INVALID or REGEN_CONTAINMENT in codes=), a numstat git could not produce, and a binary code-class path (it is never counted as 0 lines).

The registry rule. Only the base commit's registry counts (the merge base's origin/<base> commit for live /ship and the current base ref's commit for the queue: origin/<base> in ready, <remote>/<base> in train build), and only entries with a command, which pregate's regen check proves for that tree. An entry added on the branch never excludes anything; command: null entries, vendored code and lockfiles stay runtime. To adopt it, commit an entry like this on the base branch:

{
  "$schema": "https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/docs/pregate.md#generated-v1",
  "entries": [
    { "id": "skill-docs", "command": "bun run gen:skill-docs --host all", "outputs": ["*/SKILL.md", "*/sections/*.md"], "inputs": ["*/SKILL.md.tmpl", "*/sections/*.tmpl"] }
  ]
}

Gate paths for the machinery itself. An edit to lib/review-depth.ts, lib/review-collect.ts, bin/gstack-review-plan, lib/review-scope.ts, lib/review-targeted.ts, review/specialists/targeted.md, lib/ship-queue*.ts, lib/regen.ts, .gstack/generated.json, ship/sections/review-army.md.tmpl, ship/sections/adversarial.md.tmpl or scripts/resolvers/review-army.ts is gate class: changing how much review runs gets the most review. rules= (DEPTH_RULES) hashes the deciding constants and patterns, not file bytes, so a comment edit keeps it.

--depth-floor standard|full (a /ship prompt flag, passed to every plan run) raises the depth and never lowers it.

Numbers keep the outside voice. At light depth the outside voice runs only when the diff publishes numeric claims: gstack-review-plan scans the added lines of prose and data files for percentages, money, multipliers, durations, token or credit counts and score, rate or speed claims (NUMBERS: yes). The claims' fingerprint (fingerprint=) is passed back as --reviewed-numbers; when a later fix changes a claim, only the outside voice reruns, on the numbers. It always reads the whole diff.

The adversarial and outside voices run once per invocation (Step 11, on the final tree), as the last full-pass plan lists them; after they ran, decision 2 passes --adversarial-ran so a repeat lists them no more. Later full passes rerun the specialists on the range only. Step 11.5 binds a planned skip through the Step 9 record's CURRENT freshness instead of a native record.

Effort. The core checklist, the Red Team, the native adversarial pass and fix-checks run at full effort (the lane's reasoning); specialists run at medium (GSTA-167 part 3: the no-loss controls ran them there), except light's batched specialist, which carries the Red Team prompt and stays full. The outside voice and the native adversarial pass carry the floor sentence and end each finding with Severity: and Blocks: yes|no; a finding is CRITICAL when its label rule says so (native FIXABLE, outside Critical or High) or it says Blocks: yes, and Blocks: no never lowers one (gstack-review-dispatch collect). Work that cannot block (the Step 7 coverage audit, the Step 8 plan-completion audit, the Step 14.5 docs audit, decision-trail reviewers, watchers) runs at light: the same model at a lower reasoning effort, never a cheaper model family. The outside voice keeps its own provider and effort (codex_effort). A host that cannot set a subagent's effort runs it at its default. gstack-config set review_effort_tiers off (or --no-tiers) runs the specialists, audits and watchers at the host default too (model-policy.md).

Behavior changes

• Pass 2 after a blocking fix on a diff below full depth, with a fix range of at most 150 runtime lines, is a scoped pass: a fix-check, the Red Team and the native adversarial pass on the range instead of the specialist army.
• A tests-only diff (runtime 0) no longer dispatches the Testing specialist: the core checklist and the gate scan review it.
• Every depth dispatches one batched specialist instead of one reader per checklist; Maintainability, Performance and Simplification run only when forced.
• Light no longer runs a separate Red Team: the batched specialist carries its prompt. At runtime 0 light runs no adversarial pass either.
• Standard reads thresholds on runtime lines, not the whole diff, so a test-heavy diff with few runtime lines dispatches fewer specialists.
• A JSON, CSV, TSV or raster data file no code names is docs, not runtime (GSTA-167 part 4a). A binary image no code names is no longer a binary_code_path error that forces full depth; one that code names still is.

Targeted pass on money, gate, auth and secret code

Some code is costly to get wrong: code that spends money, code that decides whether a check passes, code that decides who gets in, and code that handles secrets. When a diff touches one of these, gstack-review-plan dispatches one more reader, targeted, at every depth, light included. It reads the whole diff, fixtures and tests included, with the blocks of review/specialists/targeted.md for the classes that hit, and it runs in Step 11 beside the native adversarial pass and the outside voice (GST-257).

lib/review-targeted.ts decides the classes from added and deleted lines, so removing a cap, a check or a redaction counts. Docs and tests paths never count, and matching is token-bounded: costume never reads as cost.

Class	Signal
money	a path segment naming cost, spend, budget, ledger, billing, price, fee or invoice; or a changed line with an identifier ending in _usd or Usd, any spend_cap spelling, or a call to a paid provider lib/pricing.ts prices
gate	a hunk the gate scan tagged: a relaxed threshold, a skipped test, a loosened check
auth	SCOPE_AUTH from gstack-diff-scope, on a code path with an auth, session, jwt, permission or role token in its name
secret	a secrets, credentials, keychain or token path, or a changed line that reads a key-named environment variable (OPENAI_API_KEY, GH_TOKEN) or a credential store

An input the classifier cannot read (the diff, gstack-diff-scope, the gate scan) fails closed to all four classes. TARGETED_RULES hashes the patterns. The classifier and the brief are gate paths, so an edit that weakens them gets full review.

The plan prints TARGETED: classes=<money,gate,auth,secret|none> rules=<hash> brief=<sha256 of the brief> targeted_patch_id=<id> and, when a class hit, DISPATCH: targeted targeted effort=full. The targeted reader always reads the whole diff: render --role targeted refuses a --diff-base other than the merge base, so on pass 2 and later it gets the merge base, not RANGE_BASE. After a fix, pass --targeted-ran <targeted_patch_id> from the line the reader ran on: the same committed patch skips the reader, and a changed one, uncommitted edits or none dispatch it again. targeted_patch_id is the patch-id of the whole committed diff, tests included, so a test-only fix that adds a gate hunk dispatches it again; it is not the receipt's product_patch_id.

The brief states the blocking floor in one sentence, and its money block cites the checklist's Forced-CRITICAL rule on uncapped spend, so a money finding can block without new floor words. The reader is read-only, and NO FINDINGS is a result. gstack-review-dispatch render --role targeted --classes <classes> renders its brief; verify --targeted-out <file> writes the record that gstack-ship-receipt write --review-targeted @<file> puts in the receipt. gstack-ship-queue ready and train build print REVIEW_TARGETED: required=<classes|none> receipt=<classes|none|legacy> verdict=ok|missing and refuse nothing yet; enforcement comes in a later release.

Over the last 100 non-release commits on main (8663c3d2..8be7f213), money hit 21, gate 18, auth 3 and secret 8. The gate class first used the gate paths, which hit 43 of 100; those paths already get full depth, so the gate class was narrowed to the gate scan's tagged hunks.

What the receipt records

gstack-review-scope summary --since <REVIEW_SINCE> reads this invocation's review-log rows and writes the counters gstack-ship-receipt write --review-loop puts in the receipt:

Field	Meaning
review_loop.passes	full review passes this ship ran (1 or 2; up to 3 under review_scope: all)
review_loop.blocking_found	distinct blocking findings across the passes
review_loop.deferred	blocking findings in unchanged code filed as issues (a Step 11 late defer, logged as a review-late-defer row so it never displaces the newest review pass, counts here and is not a pass)
review_loop.noted	below-floor findings listed in the PR body
review_loop.fixed	findings fixed in this PR
review_loop.scope	the review_scope the loop ran under
review_loop.fix_checks	fix-checks this ship ran (never passes)
review_loop.dispatches	reviewer dispatches by role: specialist, red-team, adversarial-native, outside-voice, fix-check, targeted
review_loop.est_input_tokens	prompt plus diff bytes the dispatches read, divided by 4: a relative estimate for comparing runs, not a bill
review_targeted	the targeted pass: the classes it covered, rules, brief_sha, the receipt's own product_patch_id, status (done only with its output collected and the committed diff it was rendered on still the one at verify, else failed; absent when write got no record, which the queue reports as legacy), findings and raised_by; a carry keeps it while the product patch is unchanged

Each review row may carry dispatches: [{role, effort, prompt_bytes, diff_bytes, status}], and each finding raised_by (the reviewer that raised it, stamped by gstack-review-scope classify; unknown when untagged, absent on older rows); summary adds them up (older rows fall back to the specialist stats they record). The summary line appends fix_checks=, dispatches= and est_input_tokens= only when they were recorded, so an old loop prints the old line.

Beside the counters, write records review_depth (the depth, runtime lines, rules hash, base and registry commits, and the gate scan bound to the head) and the queue refuses a receipt below the depth its head needs (ship-policy.md#ship-receipt). A stop the owner accepted after a fix-check edit goes in review_loop_exception, never in prose under REVIEW_LOOP:.

The receipt's summary line prints passes=<n> blocking_found=<k> deferred=<m>, which is what a scorecard tracks (target: a median of 1 pass per PR). A receipt carried across a base merge or a test-only fix (ship-policy.md#receipt-carry) keeps these counters, because the reviewed product diff is unchanged.

The scope knob

.gstack/ship-policy.json review_scope (ship-policy.md#review-scope):

Value	Pass 1	Blocking finding in unchanged code	Pass 2+	Cap
frozen (default)	the diff	filed as an issue, listed as deferred	the range since the previous pass, blocking only	2 full passes + 1 fix-check
diff-plus-blocking	the diff	fixed in this PR	the range since the previous pass, blocking only	2 full passes + 1 fix-check
all	everything	fixed in this PR	the whole diff, every finding	3 fix cycles

diff-plus-blocking is the fallback for a repository where deferred issues pile up; all is the loop as it ran before the key existed. A value other than frozen needs min_gstack_version at or past the release that added the key (REVIEW_SCOPE_KEY_VERSION in lib/ship-policy.ts) so an older gstack refuses the file by name instead of ignoring the key.

Reviewer fan-out

The review army launches every selected specialist in one message so they run in parallel; a host that caps running subagents makes that impossible past the cap. In /ship the knob is a prompt flag, --review-fanout auto|serial|parallel (default auto), read where the force flags (--all-specialists) are (/review on its own keeps the single parallel batch: its generated SKILL.md sits at its size pin, and a refused launch there is a failed reader, never dropped coverage):

Value	Batches
auto	when the host reports fewer free subagent slots than selected specialists, batches of the free-slot count (at least one), each launched in one message, the next only after every reader of the previous one finished or is confirmed stopped; a host that reports no slot count runs one parallel batch
serial	batches of one
parallel	one batch regardless of slots; a refused launch is a failed reader, never silently dropped coverage

Capy caps a thread at 8 running subagents, and waiting or idle ones hold a slot, so under auto a nine-specialist review on an otherwise idle Capy thread runs as one batch of 8 and one of 1 (Fan-out: 9 specialists in 2 batches of 8). Batching changes the order, never the set: every selected specialist runs before the merge stage, and the Red Team's activation reads the merged result as before.

Two checklist rules with ids

Two findings review/checklist.md names by rule id so a PR body, a review log and a later reader agree on what was flagged:

• prereg-with-results (Pass 1, Gate Integrity, ASK): one diff adds or changes an eval's preregistration (bars, arms, decoys, stop rules, a plan file) and also adds that eval's results, scores or verdict. The bar could have been set after the outcome, so the pairing is the finding. The repair is a split: the preregistration lands first and the results PR cites its merged commit.
• test-keyboard-count-loop (Pass 2, informational): a browser-driver test reaches an element by a counted loop of key presses and asserts on whatever has focus, so the count encodes today's DOM order. Locate the target by role, label or test id; a counted loop stays only when the count is the behavior under test.

Porting a contributor's work

A ported branch keeps the contributor's commits as theirs and adds the porter's fixes on top, each crediting the original authors. gstack-coauthor-trailers [<range> | --base <ref>] [--message <file>] [--exclude <email>]... lists every distinct author of the range's commits (default origin/<base>..HEAD) other than the checkout's own committer identity, in first-appearance order, as Co-authored-by: Name <email> lines; --message <file> adds the ones the commit message file lacks to its trailer block (git interpret-trailers, pinned placement, so an existing co-author keeps attribution), matched by email case-folded, so running it twice changes nothing. The COAUTHORS: <n> in <range> line on stderr is the receipt; --json prints { range, authors, trailers, appended }.

Verbatim dispatch

A driven /ship (ship/DRIVER.md) never lets the model write a reviewer's brief or merge a reviewer's findings. The no-loss replays showed why: with briefs the parent filled in by hand, only 37 of 112 dispatched prompts matched the rendered ones, and the arm lost blockers. bin/gstack-review-dispatch closes both ends:

1. render --role <role> [--name <n>] --out <dir> cuts the brief out of ship/sections/review-army.md or ship/sections/adversarial.md (the fix-check from scripts/resolvers/fix-check.ts) and fills only declared slots: the literal diff base, the plan's DIFF_CMD excludes, stack, test framework, learnings, checklist paths, the Red Team's merged findings and specialist count, and the outside voice's branch diff. A section that lost an anchor or placeholder refuses (BRIEF_RENDER_FAILED) instead of rendering something else.
2. The dispatch program passes that file's content unchanged as the reader's prompt and runs sent on what it passed: a hash that differs from the rendered one is BRIEF_MISMATCH, and that reader's review does not count.
3. collect hashes each reader's raw output and appends its findings to merged.jsonl with the label as written (a JSON line's severity, or the most severe of a prose line's Critical, High, Medium, Low, P0-P3, FIXABLE or INVESTIGATE wherever they stand, headings and table rows included; a top-level list item under a label-only heading takes the stronger of the two). A Severity: or Blocks: line continues the finding above it until a list item, heading, bold paragraph opener or a second line for the same field starts another: Severity raises its label, Blocks: yes makes it CRITICAL and Blocks: no never lowers it; an inline Blocks: yes is CRITICAL too, and with no finding above it is one. The native adversarial voice's FIXABLE collects as CRITICAL (normalizer v2, GSTA-167). An unnumbered, unlabeled bullet with no file:line under a paragraph finding whose Severity or Blocks line has not come yet is that finding's detail, so the field line after it lands on the finding; a numbered item is its own finding. A phantom finding costs a fold; a lost one costs the gate. A reply with no finding counts as a review only with the clean marker its own brief asks for: NO FINDINGS alone on a line for the specialists, the batched specialist, the targeted reader, the Red Team and fix-check, the Recommendation: line for the outside voice, either for the native adversarial voice. Without one (a refusal, an empty reply, a reader that never saw the diff) collect records review: false, prints COLLECT_NOT_REVIEWED and exits 1.
4. Lead judgment writes judged.jsonl; judge refuses a set that drops a merged finding, lowers its severity, folds it into a less severe duplicate, or adds or promotes one without a reason (JUDGMENT_REJECTED). A merged file missing any id the ledger collected is a drop. Each addition and promotion is logged with its reason.
5. verify --ledger <f> replays all of it from the run's ledger: rendered against dispatched hashes per render (each render is one dispatch of its reader, so a two-pass ledger checks pass-1 sends against pass-1 briefs; a later render prints as <reader>@2), a collected output that is a review for every sent reader (NOT_COLLECTED otherwise, and the output row NOT_REVIEWED; the marker is checked again in the output file when it is unchanged, so an older ledger meets the same rule; a non-review the same dispatch later replaced with a review, by re-sending the brief, is VOIDED and counted in voided=N). The outside voice may fail without blocking: collect --unavailable '<reason>' records its failure text as missing coverage (COLLECT_UNAVAILABLE); an empty reason or an output that holds findings is refused (exit 2), so a partial answer is collected normally and loses nothing. Verify prints its brief and output UNAVAILABLE and unavailable=N on the verdict line, and its coverage is logged unavailable in the review-log row; any other reader is refused (exit 2), because its missing coverage leaves the review incomplete. A mismatched send re-sent byte-exact before anything was collected is void and counted (voided=N on the verdict line); one that produced an output stays MISMATCH. Then output hashes against the merged lines they produced, and the judgment rerun against the recorded judged set, covering every collected id. A ledger from a run that kept no prompts prints VERIFY: no brief records (exit 3), never clean.
6. pass --base <b> --out <dir> --pass <id> -- <plan flags> runs one pass from a staged manifest (<dir>/pass-manifest.json): audit readers marked first, then the specialists with QA and the other audits, then the Red Team, then Step 11's voices. Each reviewer keeps its plan entry and is rendered by the same code as render, once its inputs exist; the Red Team's findings file is the specialists' merged.jsonl lines byte for byte. A brief leaves the bin in indexed chunks of at most 65,536 characters (chunk), so no tool output line carries a whole brief and a host's line or output cap cannot cut one. Each reader's intent is recorded before its subagent is created and its path right after (mark), so a resumed pass finds a create whose result was lost by its title and never starts a reader twice; a missing or doubled title stops the pass. On Capy the pass runs as one call to the checked-in program lib/capy-review-pass.js, served by program and loaded unchanged by the gstack Capy skill.

Where this is enforced

• lib/review-brief.ts, lib/review-ledger.ts, lib/review-pass.ts, lib/capy-review-pass.js, bin/gstack-review-dispatch: verbatim dispatch (test/review-dispatch.test.ts, test/review-pass.test.ts).

• scripts/resolvers/review-army.ts: the floor and NO FINDINGS in every specialist and Red Team prompt (rendered into review/sections/review-army.md and ship/sections/review-army.md), and the lead judgment's "On record" line that turns a ruled class into a note; in /ship every specialist and Red Team prompt it renders carries its diff base as a literal sha the parent writes in (DIFF_BASE=<diff-base>: the merge base on pass 1, RANGE_BASE from pass 2 on) beside its plan's DIFF_CMD excludes, because a reviewer is its own process and never sees the parent's shell variables; the fan-out batches above.

• ship/sections/review-army.md Step 9: the plan's REVIEW_DEPTH, GATE_SCAN and --depth-floor on every run, the depth fields of the review-log row, passes, RANGE_BASE, classify, defer, render, the cap check before any edit, the Step 11 late-defer row, scratch files under .gstack/tmp/, the cap decisions; ship/sections/adversarial.md Step 11: the outside voice reads the same range and scopes queued fixes the same way.

• lib/review-depth.ts, bin/gstack-review-plan: the diff class, the depth (depthFor, DEPTH_RULES, depthOfCommitInput), each dispatch's exclude pathspecs and DIFF_CMD, the transition table, the numeric-claim scan and each role's effort tier (test/review-depth.test.ts, test/review-plan-cli.test.ts).

• lib/review-collect.ts: collectCommit (git objects only, from any checkout) and collectLive (the working tree), per-path lines and the base commit's registry (test/review-collect.test.ts).

• lib/review-scope.ts, bin/gstack-review-scope: classify, defer, render, summary (with fix_checks, dispatches, est_input_tokens); refusals are REVIEW_SCOPE_INPUT and REVIEW_SCOPE_RANGE (troubleshooting.md).

• lib/ship-policy.ts: the review_scope key and its ship: review_scope … consequence line.

• review/checklist.md: prereg-with-results under Gate Integrity and test-keyboard-count-loop under Pass 2; bin/gstack-coauthor-trailers for the contributor-credit trailers of a port.

• lib/ship-receipt-prose.ts, gstack-ship-receipt read --check-prose: the body's quoted counters against the receipt (RECEIPT_PROSE_MISMATCH, ship-policy.md).

• lib/ship-receipt.ts, lib/headless-artifacts.ts: the review_loop receipt object, its schema and the summary line.