Junior to Senior

Assume the plan in front of you was written by a capable junior: fluent, confident, and trained on the past. Build a senior reviewer that is grounded in two things the junior was not — this codebase as it actually exists and the state of the art as it exists today — and let the senior tear the plan down and rebuild it.

This skill exists because agent-generated plans fail at two altitudes:

• Fog — the plan describes the high level fine ("add caching", "handle auth", "make it scalable") but never commits on the hard parts. No interfaces, no data shapes, no failure handling, no named libraries. An engineer reading it still has to make every real decision themselves.
• Tunnel — the plan dives into function signatures and file diffs but has no product vision. No statement of who this is for, what success means, what is out of scope, or why this approach beats the boring alternative. It optimizes a local detail while the shape of the feature is still wrong.

Both are altitude failures. The senior's job is to drag the plan to the right altitude and upgrade its substance past the model's training cutoff.

The cardinal rule

Every senior finding needs evidence. A claim about the codebase cites a file and line. A claim about best practice cites a fetched source — official docs, release notes, an RFC, a postmortem — with a date. If web research is unavailable, the finding is labeled [training-data, unverified] so stale knowledge is never laundered as current truth. A senior who argues from vibes is just a louder junior.

Phase 0: Capture the junior artifact

Identify exactly what is under review: