scripts/review-package generates the reviewer's input deterministically:
commit list, stat summary, and net diff with -U10 context, written to a
file from an explicit BASE. Live runs showed controllers improvising
'git diff HEAD~1..HEAD', which silently truncates multi-commit tasks,
and svelte's five fix dispatches shipped without re-running any tests —
fix dispatches now explicitly carry the implementer's
re-run-and-report contract.
The skill read as a changelog: 'combined task review,' 'one reviewer,
one reading,' 'one dispatch,' and an example still showing diffs pasted
into prompts. A reader who never saw the two-reviewer design has no
referent for 'combined.' Prose now states the design directly, and the
flowchart/example reflect the diff-file handoff.
Paste adoption stayed at 0/15 even as a Red Flag — and the controller's
reluctance is locally rational: pasting loads the diff into the (most
expensive) controller context permanently, while a reviewer self-fetch
costs a few cheap turns. The diff-file handoff is cheap for both sides:
the controller redirects git diff to /tmp without reading it, and the
reviewer gets the whole change in one Read call.
Fourth planted-defect failure mode: the implementer's self-report said
'noted mild structural duplication; left unabstracted per YAGNI' and the
reviewer deferred to that framing, rating the duplication no finding at
all. The pre-judging keeps relocating — controller prompt, then reviewer
calibration, now the implementer's report. Rationales are claims; they
never downgrade severity.
Adoption was 6/11 reviews on fractals and 0/17 on svelte when phrased
as guidance; reviewers without the diff re-derive it by hand, which is
the single largest remaining reviewer cost. Now a Red Flags Never entry
and a REQUIRED marker on the template placeholder.
With merged review, a planted verbatim-duplication defect shipped: the
reviewer rated it Minor (YAGNI) under the strict cannot-be-trusted
definition of Important, and the Minor-rolls-up rule meant no fix was
ever dispatched and the final review never saw the finding. Calibration
now names merge-blocking maintainability damage (verbatim duplication,
swallowed errors, assertion-free tests) as Important, and controllers
must paste accumulated Minor findings into the final review dispatch.
Iteration-1 profiling: implementers and per-dispatch overhead dominate
(429 of 686 subagent turns; controller coordination is half the dollars
and scales with dispatch count), reviewers are individually lean, and
the controller pasted the diff in only 2 of 22 review dispatches when
the guidance was phrased as optional.
Changes: spec-reviewer-prompt.md + code-quality-reviewer-prompt.md
replaced by task-reviewer-prompt.md (one reviewer, one reading of a
pasted diff, two verdicts: spec compliance ✅/❌/⚠️ and task quality);
one fix dispatch can address both kinds of findings; controller now
runs git diff itself and pastes it (imperative, not optional);
implementers run focused tests while iterating and the full suite once
before committing; flowchart, example, Red Flags, tool tables updated.
The broad final whole-branch review is unchanged.
Round-2 fractals eval regressed to 70min/32.2M tokens (vs round-1's
42.8min/14.5M) while reaching baseline-parity quality. Per-subagent turn
profiling attributed it to: haiku dispatches taking 2-3x the turns of
sonnet (678 of 1197 subagent turns), reviewers re-fetching diffs by hand
(518 Bash calls), and evidence-rule narration. Changes: turn-count-beats-
token-price model guidance; controllers paste small diffs into reviewer
prompts (reviewers then need few or no tool calls); evidence scoped to
findings and would-be-bare-yes checks; Important defined as cannot-trust-
until-fixed with coverage suggestions Minor; fixes dispatched only for
Critical/Important.
Resumed the offending eval controller session and asked it why it
pre-judged despite the rule being in context. Its retrospective: the
motive was avoiding a review loop, the abstract rule was read but not
applied at the moment it governs, and a phrase-level trigger ('do not
flag', 'at most Minor', 'don't treat X as a defect', 'the plan chose')
would have fired where the principle did not.
Second observed instance: with the Constructing Reviewer Prompts rule
already live, a controller still wrote 'do not treat that duplication as
a defect to fix — the plan chose it; you may note it as a Minor
observation at most' into a quality reviewer dispatch, fabricating plan
intent from the plan's example snippet. Promote the rule to the Red
Flags Never list and name the rationalization.
Live eval deliverables shipped five polish defects; tracing each through
the transcripts showed three mechanisms, each now addressed:
- reviewers answered pointed checklist items with unsupported yes
(evidence rule: every What-to-Check answer needs file:line evidence)
- no reviewer ever saw the design's global constraints (controllers now
paste binding constraints into task requirements)
- test output noise was invisible everywhere (pristine-output checks in
implementer self-review and quality review)
In live eval runs, controllers given judgment-based model selection
stopped passing a model at all; the omitted parameter inherits the
session's top-tier model, silently making every subagent maximally
expensive (one run dispatched 26/26 reviewers on the session model).
A live eval run of sdd-quality-reviewer-catches-planted-defect caught the
SDD controller fabricating a plan constraint and instructing the quality
reviewer not to flag the planted DRY violation. The duplication shipped.
Constructing Reviewer Prompts now bans suppression directives alongside
open-ended broadening directives.
Bumps evals 7f8e80c -> db37d5f (superpowers-evals#16): the claude launcher now
sets CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_SESSION_PERSISTENCE=1 so nested interactive claude
(>=2.1.176) persists its transcript — restoring claude capture (verdicts +
cost/token data) on the latest CLI (2.1.177) with no version pin. Also folds in
the audit_liveness ruff/ty cleanup and the B1 audit-doc correction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A second adversarial review of the merged branch found that combining the
session-key auth with the feature work created real bugs the (vacuous) tests
missed:
- [Critical] GET /files/ (empty name) resolved to CONTENT_DIR and crashed the
process with uncaught EISDIR — newly reachable because the query-stripping
refactor turns /files/?key=... into /files/. Reject non-regular-file names.
- [High] --open opened a KEYLESS url, which the auth gate 403s — the headline
feature landed on the error page. Open the keyed url.
- [High] Same-port restart regenerated the token (port persisted, token not), so
the open tab's old cookie 403'd and never reconnected — contradicting the
documented promise. Persist the token (BRAINSTORM_TOKEN_FILE / .last-token)
alongside the port.
- [Medium] Token sat in world-readable server-info/server.log (0644 in /tmp).
umask 077 in start-server.sh + mode 0600 on server-info/.last-token.
- [Medium] touchActivity() ran before the auth check, so unauthenticated requests
defeated the idle timeout. Count activity only after authorization.
- [Low] COOKIE_NAME embedded the pre-fallback port; derive it from the actual
bound port (also prevents a cross-server cookie-jar collision on fallback).
Tests added/strengthened (previously passed vacuously): /files/ no-crash; the
auto-open url carries the key and is reachable (200); restart reuses the same key
not just the port; unauthenticated requests don't reset the idle clock.
Full suite green (ws-protocol 32, helper 12, auth 13, server 29, lifecycle 8,
stop-server 4); restart smoke confirms same port+key and old URL -> 200.
