review-council

Review Council Protocol

Token budget — read this first

Load personas on demand, never all at once.

• There are 20+ persona files. Loading all of them would consume the entire context window.
• In Phase 2 you select 3–6 personas. Load only those files — nothing else.
• Each persona subagent receives only: its own persona file + domain profile + scope brief. No other context.
• Subagents run in isolation — they do not inherit the parent session's full context.
• Persona outputs returned to the parent are compressed (max 300 words each).
• If you find yourself loading more than 6 persona files, stop and reduce the council size.

Overview

The council reviews code, architecture, or design decisions using independent expert personas that debate, challenge each other, and converge on a verdict. The human engineer is an active participant, not a passive recipient.

Minimum council size: 3 personas. Council size by complexity:

• simple (single component, low risk): 3 personas
• medium (cross-cutting feature, moderate risk): 4–5 personas
• complex (system-level, high risk, multiple teams): 5–6 personas

Always include at least one of: staff-engineer, cloud-cost-architect, appsec-architect — cost and security angles must be represented in every council.

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Phase 0 — Scope + Early Human Input

1. If /design-review was called with a scope argument, use it as-is.
2. If no argument: run a quick repo scan (1 Haiku subagent, gitnexus ctx_search or file glob) to identify the highest-risk or most recently changed area. Propose this as scope.
3. Present to human and ask:
   • "Does this scope look right, or do you want to focus elsewhere?"
   • "What concerns you most about this? Any known constraints (deadline, regulatory, performance budget)?"
   • "Any personas you want added or removed from the council?"
4. Record answers verbatim as the Phase 0 Human Brief — this shapes everything downstream.
5. If the user requests a persona not in standard-personas/: generate it using the schema in user-generated-personas/README.md, save it to user-generated-personas/<name>.md globally, then use it in this session.