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 — runs before every other gate)

Before issuing any verdict — flag, reject, or downgrade a finding — 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.

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 flag code that is not in the file. It runs before the hard gates below.

Hard gates (sequenced)

Complete these in order before you add a finding. Skip a gate only when it clearly does not apply (e.g. skip the usages gate if the finding is not about dead code or “unused”).