independent-review-gate

independent-review-gate is a skill for Claude Code from Fergius-Engineering/instincts. It costs 23 tokens per session (448 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An independent review checkpoint for complex changes before they are declared finished or merged into a codebase.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before merging features, shipping specifications, or claiming non-trivial work is complete.
Why use it?
It catches defects and overlooked edge cases that the author and existing tests may miss.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the instincts plugin — 20 skills, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it before merging features, shipping specifications, or claiming non-trivial work is complete.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Fergius-Engineering/instincts --skill independent-review-gate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Fergius-Engineering/instincts

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install instincts, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for independent-review-gate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for independent-review-gate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/independent-review-gate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 448 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00023 $0.00448
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00224
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00090
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00045

Measured 10d ago against content hash 43e1a1ca71ca, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

independent-review-gate scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/independent-review-gate/SKILL.md · 39 lines

What it actually says

The rule

Your own review and a green test suite are not enough. You're invested in the approach, so you read past your own mistakes, and the tests only cover what you already thought to check. Before calling complex work done, have someone or something with no stake review the whole change.

A fresh set of eyes catches the defect that's obvious in hindsight and invisible to you.

This is the non-optional version of superpowers' requesting-code-review: the review is not a step to skip when the suite is green, because the green suite is exactly what can't be trusted alone — and the fix you make after the review gets re-reviewed too.

Fires when

Finishing a feature or a spec. Before merging. Before claiming "done" on anything non-trivial, or anything that ships to other people.

How to apply

Hand the full diff to an independent reviewer with explicit angles to check: correctness, edge cases, the branches no test touches, backward compatibility. Fix the blockers and cover each one with a test. Then re-review the fix itself — a second pass catches the inverted-fix mistake faster than a new test would.

The green suite is not the gate. The independent verdict is.

Worked example

Your change to a payment client passes all 200 tests and your own read-through. A reviewer with fresh eyes notices that one branch — the error path no test covers — has an inverted condition: it retries on success and gives up on failure.

The suite was green because it only ran the happy path. Your own review missed it because you "knew" what the code was meant to do, so you read what you intended instead of what you wrote.

The independent pass caught it before users did.

Red flags

Thought Reality
"Tests pass, so it's done" Tests only cover what you thought to test.
"I already reviewed it myself" You can't see your own blind spot.
"It's obviously correct" The expensive bugs always look obvious until they bite.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 39 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 43e1a1ca71ca

Subscribe to this mod's changes

independent-review-gate is a skill published in the GitHub repository Fergius-Engineering/instincts (2 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 448 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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