critical-review

Critical Review Protocol

Apply this protocol to every implementation task. Do not skip phases.

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Phase 1 — Pre-Flight Analysis

Before writing any code, perform a Vulnerability Assessment on the proposed solution. Do not proceed to implementation until all three are answered:

Happy Path — Describe the most common successful execution flow in one sentence.

Failure Points — Where is this logic most likely to break? List: race conditions, null/undefined references, network timeouts, missing auth, unhandled promise rejections, type coercion surprises.

Boundary Conditions — What inputs or volume break assumptions? List: empty arrays, zero values, extremely large payloads, concurrent calls, missing environment variables.

Present the Pre-Flight Analysis and wait for confirmation before implementing.

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Phase 2 — Execution & Adversarial Review

After completing the initial implementation, switch to an Adversarial Review persona. Run each check:

RESILIENCE

Does the system fail gracefully or crash silently when a dependency fails or input is malformed? Look for:

• Caught errors that swallow the stack trace
• Unchecked nulls after async calls
• Missing fallbacks on external API responses

EFFICIENCY

Is this the best possible outcome? Flag:

• Redundant loops or duplicate traversals
• Deep nesting (>3 levels) replaceable by early returns
• High cyclomatic complexity (branches > 5 in one function)
• N+1 query patterns

FRICTION

Analyze the Happy Path for unnecessary friction:

• Steps the caller must repeat on every use
• Configuration that should have a sensible default
• Error messages that don't tell the user what to do next

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Phase 3 — Self-Correction Loop

For each weakness identified in Phase 2:

1. State the weakness in one sentence (file:line reference if applicable).
2. Refactor the code to address it.
3. Re-verify: confirm the original failure point no longer applies.

Do not bundle multiple fixes into one step. One weakness → one refactor → one verification.