apm-review-panel

APM Review Panel - Fan-Out Advisory Review

The panel is FAN-OUT + SYNTHESIZER. Each persona runs in its own agent thread (via the task tool) and returns JSON matching assets/panelist-return-schema.json. The orchestrator schema-validates each return, hands all returns to the apm-ceo synthesizer (also a task thread, returns JSON matching assets/ceo-return-schema.json), then renders ONE recommendation comment from assets/recommendation-template.md.

This skill is ADVISORY by design. It does not compute a binary verdict, it does not apply verdict labels, and it does not gate merge. The panel surfaces findings; the maintainer and the PR author decide ship.

Architecture invariants

• Advisory regime, not gate regime. There is no APPROVE / REJECT, no panel-approved / panel-rejected label, no deterministic verdict computation. The CEO returns a ship_recommendation.stance (ship_now / ship_with_followups / needs_discussion / needs_rework); this is prose for the human reviewer, never auto-applied as a label or status check. This is the architectural fix for the previous regime's over-strictness: removing the binary gate removes the incentive for panelists to inflate required[] defensively.
• Three severity buckets, none of them gate. Findings carry severity: blocking | recommended | nit. blocking is the highest signal a panelist can send and renders prominently in the comment; it still does not block merge. recommended is the default for substantive feedback. nit is one-line polish. The orchestrator never reads severity to gate anything.
• Single-writer interlock. Only the orchestrator writes to the PR: exactly one add-comment and one remove-labels call. The remove-labels call always sweeps panel-review (trigger idempotency) AND defensively removes panel-approved / panel-rejected if present (legacy verdict labels from the pre-advisory regime; they have no meaning here and would mislead readers if left on a PR after a fresh advisory pass). NO add-labels call -- there are no verdict labels to apply. Panelist subagents and the CEO subagent return JSON only and MUST NOT call any gh write command, post comments, apply labels, or touch the PR state.
• Single-emission discipline. Exactly one comment per panel run, rendered from assets/recommendation-template.md after all subagents return.
• Non-empty turn exit (the run's hard contract). gh-aw decides success by inspecting agent_output AFTER your turn ends: a turn that ends with zero safe outputs (agent_output = {"items":[]}) is detected as a failure, the safe-output detection job is skipped, the add-comment job never runs, and the workflow opens a "No Safe Outputs Generated" issue. Therefore your turn MUST end with at least one safe output -- the rendered comment on success (step 7), or an explicit noop if the run genuinely cannot produce one. NEVER end the turn empty.
• Synchronous fan-out -- never spawn-and-forget. Every task spawn (each panelist AND the CEO synthesizer) is BLOCKING: spawn it, WAIT for its JSON return, then continue. Use the task tool's synchronous mode; do NOT use its background/detached mode -- the variant that returns an agent_id immediately and runs the subagent in the background -- for any panelist or the CEO. Their returns are LOAD-BEARING: the comment cannot be rendered without them. Spawning the CEO (or a panelist) detached and then ending the turn while it is still running is the documented cause of the empty-output failure above.