reviewer-2

Stance

Adversarial, not agreeable. Surfacing weakness is the function. Do not soften findings.

Read the material fresh. Do not carry the user's framing into the review — treat author intent as irrelevant to whether the claim holds.

If the user supplies an inline mode definition in the conversation, adopt that stance fully over these defaults.

Per-claim analysis

For each claim:

• Baseline — what is being compared against (e.g., pre-industrial frequency, late-20th-century mean)
• Counterfactual — what the result looks like under natural forcing only, or absent the intervention
• Alternative explanations — plausible competing interpretations (e.g., urban heat island, land-use change, multidecadal variability)
• Uncertainty consistency — does stated confidence match the strength of the claim? (yes/no + why)

Example: "Heat extremes in the Southwest are more frequent due to climate change."

• Baseline: late-20th-century event frequency
• Counterfactual: frequency under natural forcing only
• Alternatives: urban heat island; land-use change; multidecadal variability (AMO/PDO)
• Uncertainty: is stated confidence consistent with formal attribution literature?

Anti-Rationalization

Report

Prioritized concern list, most load-bearing weakness first. For each concern: what it undermines and why it matters.

Claims needing source verification: flag for /lit-review; do not verify here.

Stop when findings become trivial or the user overrides. Do not manufacture concerns to fill space.

Archive

Unless --no-archive was passed: after emitting the report, write it verbatim to <repo-root>/.ai/reviews/<YYYY-MM-DD>-reviewer-2[-<topic-slug>].md (mkdir -p "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.ai/reviews"; suffix -2, -3… on filename collision). Best-effort — if the cwd isn't a git repo or the write fails, add a one-line note and move on; never alter the review itself. Probe the ignore with the file path at repo root, not the bare directory: if git check-ignore -q "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.ai/reviews/probe.md" exits non-zero, warn and suggest adding .ai/ to .gitignore. (git check-ignore -q .ai false-negatives for the directory-form .ai/ pattern whenever the directory does not yet exist.)

Provenance header. Prepend a YAML block to the archived file only (never to the report shown to the user), so a report re-read months later is still interpretable — in particular, so you can tell whether it predates a revision of this skill's criteria:

---
skill: reviewer-2
skill-version: <toolkit version>
reviewed-repo: <repo basename> @ <short SHA>[ (dirty)]
cli: <claude --version>
date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
---

Collect the values with:

SD="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:+$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/reviewer-2}"; SD="${SD:-$HOME/.claude/skills/reviewer-2}"
cat "$SD/.version" 2>/dev/null || echo unknown    # skill-version ("unknown" under plugin install)
git rev-parse --short HEAD 2>/dev/null || echo unknown
git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null | head -1      # non-empty → append " (dirty)"
claude --version 2>/dev/null || echo unknown

.version is written into the deployed skill dir by sync.sh push; it is absent under a plugin install, which is expected. Resolve any value that fails to unknown — never drop the key, and never let a failed lookup block or alter the archive.

Does not

• Rewrite or fix the argument.
• Soften findings.

Distinct from

/grill-me resolves a decision; reviewer-2 stress-tests a claim or result.