pattern-review

Pattern Review

The bundled /simplify reviews a diff for reuse, simplification, efficiency and altitude. It is good and it knows nothing about this codebase. This skill is the half it cannot supply: what OUR layering is, where things belong here, and the specific ways code generated against this repo has drifted from it before.

It does not restate the architecture. codebase-map and gateway-dev own that, and a second copy here would drift from them — which is the exact defect this skill exists to find. Load them; this file only tells you what to DO with them.

Relationship to the design-time check

codebase-map has a "Quality pass — design-time, not post-hoc" section ruling that agent fan-out review does not run on every change by default, and giving four questions to answer inline before implementing instead. That rule stands and this skill does not compete with it:

• Before writing code → answer those four questions inline. Cheaper, and it shapes the code instead of criticising it.
• After a diff exists, on request or before a substantial push → this skill. One pass, scoped to the diff, no four-agent fan-out.

If you find yourself running this on every two-line edit, the design-time check is the one you skipped.

The failure mode this repo actually has

Not "the code is too complicated". Every quality pass in this repo's history converged on one mechanism: new code is started by copying the nearest sibling, and the copy and the original then diverge. From the log:

• cf5cb4f — the playground had hand-copied the tool-visibility policy from mcp-server.ts, and the copy had silently dropped a branch the original had (DOCKER_HOST_OVERRIDE). Nothing failed; one environment was just wrong.
• 7c168ff — the Agent route copy-pasted the accounts fetch from the dashboard, and the two diverged inside the same branch: one grew a refetch the other did not, so the same user saw a connected account on one screen and not the other.
• 7911d23 — the home page carried a hardcoded connector list parallel to the docs frontmatter that had already drifted from it.
• 4bcd6ee — the 401 challenge and the discovery router each spelled the same path, free to drift apart.
• 28f723c — a hand-written interface asserted over a vendor's, so tsc could not see a signature mismatch. Delete silently deleted nothing and reported success.