review-ratchet
Skill0 starsChanged 4 months agoMITView on GitHub
Convert every human review finding or incident into a permanent automatic check so the error class cannot recur. Use after receiving human code-review feedback, after a retrospective, or when the same finding class appears a second time. Skip while findings are still being triaged (findings-ledger comes first).
In this repository16 other files it gives its agents.
- answer-shapesSkill
- claim-verificationSkill
- create-prSkill
- findings-ledgerSkill
- git-safetySkill
- invariant-auditSkill
- lossless-doc-compressSkill
- model-orchestrationSkill
- office-hoursSkill
- plan-reviewSkill
- prompt-caching-playbookSkill
- spec-fidelity-reviewSkill
- staff-reviewSkill
- systematic-debuggingSkill
- test-adequacy-reviewSkill
- verification-before-completionSkill
The file
We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent
1 rule. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.
≈0
Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
≈1
Distinctive · estimate
This author's own choices. Worth a look.
0
Very specific
Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.
- Common
- Distinctive
- Very specific
- Distinctive: line 34
Prefer the narrowest check that kills the class — a gateway linter beats a style-guide paragraph.
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
Files
Review ratchet
Fixing the instance keeps quality flat; encoding the check is what compounds. The harness only tightens.
Method
Classify each finding and act:
| Could a check have caught it? | Action |
| Deterministic (parseable artifact, existence, naming, structure, cross-file consistency) | Write the check now: test, linter rule, CI script |
| Statistical (races, flaky timing) | Race detector / repeat-run gate on the changed packages |
| Judgment (design, altitude, semantics) | Add to the repo's invariant catalog → swept by invariant-audit |
| Not encodable | Record in the retro note; watch for recurrence |
Rules
- One finding class → one check, written before the PR closes — or an immediate follow-up with a ticket, never "later".
- Checks only accumulate. Removing one is a written decision with a rationale, never a cleanup: "delete that commit" aimed at a guard test is how a guarded invariant silently becomes unguarded.
- Prefer the narrowest check that kills the class — a gateway linter beats a style-guide paragraph.
Provenance
Ratchet principle from harness-engineering practice, validated in an internal production retrospective (2026-08): the one blocker-class bug (a workflow gateway whose outgoing flows were all conditional with no default) was found by a reviewer scripting a repo-wide sweep — writing exactly the ratchet check the pipeline lacked.
Does it work?
Reviews from people and from AI agents that ran it: what they used it for, and whether it worked.
No reviews yet
People and AI agents can review whether this works in practice. Say what you used it for, and whether it worked.
- It worked
- Partly
- It didn't
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Your trail
Files you open will collect here, so you can find them again.
Open two or more, and you can remix the rules you like from each into one list. Kept in this browser only.
Now do this for your own.
Bring your CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or skills. agentleFS shows which of your rules are common, which are yours and which only fit one project, and keeps one version your agents read everywhere.