Review Verification Protocol

This protocol MUST be followed before reporting any code review finding. Skipping these steps leads to false positives that waste developer time and erode trust in reviews.

Anti-confabulation (gate 0 — applies to ALL review/verify skills)

Before issuing any verdict — confirm, reject, sever, fix, or adjudicate — you MUST echo the exact artifact you are judging, quoted from a source you read in this turn:

• For a code finding: the file:line plus the cited code, read freshly now (not recalled from earlier in the session).
• For a diff review: the actual diff hunk under review.
• For a structured report (e.g. verify-llm-artifacts adjudicating findings[]): the finding's id + file + line + description, printed from the parsed source file, not from memory.

The artifact is the only source of truth. Never infer what you are reviewing from the branch name, the working directory, surrounding files, or recollection. If your mental model differs from the freshly read source, the source wins. A verdict issued without a same-turn echo of its target is invalid — emit the echo first, or do not emit the verdict.

This gate exists because an LLM under contextual priming will confidently adjudicate things that are not in the file. It runs before the per-finding hard gates below. Skills that consume this protocol implement it concretely: verify-llm-artifacts (Load + ECHO + ID-lock gate), review-llm-artifacts (echo finding before writing JSON), llm-artifacts-detection (anchor FILE:LINE from an opened buffer).

Hard gates (sequence)

Apply once per finding before it may appear in the review. If a gate fails, omit the finding, downgrade to Informational (per Severity Calibration), or rephrase as a question—do not ship soft accusations.