review-preflight

Two tools, invoked by path; neither is a boot dependency of the core.

Why the preflight exists, and why it is a script rather than a reminder. Consulting the review criteria used to rely on memory, so it was skipped exactly where it felt safe to skip -- small diffs -- and a readiness verdict with the criteria unread is an over-claim rather than a fast review. The owner caught that same miss more than once and asked directly whether the review skill had been used. Successive "be more careful" fixes did not hold, because the failure is not inattention: a reviewer who believes the diff is small has no prompt to re-read anything. Printing the criteria and the PR's live gate state is what makes the step unskippable, so the guarantee is structural rather than disciplinary.

python3 skills/review-preflight/scripts/review-preflight.py <PR>      # run before reviewing; reads <repo>/REVIEW.md
python3 skills/review-preflight/scripts/ci-triage.py <PR> [--repo o/n] # a red check is a pointer into the record: search its SUBJECT, not its name

review-preflight.py resolves the repo root via git rev-parse --show-toplevel, falling back to three levels above its own file. ci-triage.py is advisory (exit 0), and is the module review-preflight will fold in so a red check maps to a filed issue on every preflight run.

Moved here from scripts/ on the owner's decision (2026-09-04: "both review-preflight and ci-triage don't belong to scripts/"); scripts/review-preflight.py and scripts/ci-triage.py remain as two-line exec shims for one release so external callers (the pr-triage skill, peers' notes) keep working until they are repointed.