ac-review — the hand-run review

One entry point: ac-review <range>. A range the operator names, and nothing else.
Nothing triggers a review — no batch boundary, no epic close, no scheduled job. Review is
a deliberate tool, run when the operator asks for one.

Who reviews

• A different stance from the workers — the validator, tier-resolved per harness.
  (L2 — survives tier convergence) The same weights re-reading their own diff are not
  independent eyes: they share the diff's blind spot; convergence never retires this rule.
• READ-ONLY on the shared tree. No write/mutation tooling, no "just fixing it while I'm
  here" — a reviewer that can edit is a second author (H-impact incident). Sole carve-out:
  sabotage probes in a disposable worktree; the result is a finding, never a diff.
• Depth by risk, not habit. A range touching a gate, an auth path, a migration or a
  destructive operation gets all three lenses; prose and config may take correctness alone.

The contract

1. Scope. The named range, diff pathspec :(exclude).beads/.
2. The lenses. One reviewer per lens in references/review-dimensions.md —
   correctness, test-quality, and the one risk lens the diff chooses (security or
   contracts) — each prompt built from references/reviewer-prompt-template.md, all in a
   single message (parallel). A reviewer that dies is re-spawned ONCE.
3. The verify round. Before any fix, one fresh verifier per Critical/High finding runs
   each probe and tries to refute it (reviewer-prompt-template.md § The verify round).
   No Critical/High → no verify round.
4. Report and verdict. references/report-template.md, written to .claude/reviews/.
   VERDICT: APPROVED when every lens reported and every finding is dispositioned; else
   VERDICT: NEEDS_DECISION. The conductor writes the verdict, never the reviewer.

What the review judges

• The one bar (references/review-dimensions.md): a demonstrated failure in ordinary
  operation, or a violated acceptance criterion, with a reproducing command. "Could be
  bypassed" counts only against a real adversary — user input, auth, external data, PII,
  money — never our own worker, and the probe may not set up state a cooperative worker or
  a real user would not produce.
• Two things a green suite cannot see: fixture-shape validity — could each test's
  fixtures EXIST in production? A test over an impossible input asserts nothing — and
  causal sufficiency — for every bead the range closed, does THIS diff produce that
  GREEN? (The token is not the thing; a probe may have flipped for another cause.)
• Plan fidelity — the correctness lens reads the plan's ## Vision and ## Out of scope and flags any diff in range that breaks them, with one mechanical probe: the net
  line change on the epic's named files after the plan's last deliverable commit.

Findings

• Three bins replace ACCEPT/FIX/DEFER. Defect → a bead, and the impact: label
  carries its demonstration. Hardening → one line in the report, never a bead.
  Nothing → ACCEPT with one line saying what was checked.
• A confirmed defect becomes a bead whose acceptance-criterion probe IS the finding's
  reproducing command; its fix is checked by re-running that command, never by a second
  review. Fix order: delete > simplify > tighten an instruction > add code. A fix that adds
  a guard, mode or option asks the operator through the existing human-gate DECISION bead;
  a deleting fix does not ask.
• Closed epics accept no child. A late finding against a closed epic opens a follow-up
  epic — never a new child of the closed one, never a silent reopen. The follow-up carries
  its own discovered-from: trail back to the finding; the closed epic stays closed.
• Severity orders the report; only a named impact: makes a bead
  (bead-create-contract.md § Required axes). A shipped defect → -t bug;
  mutation-probe-convicted test → -t task; labels
  origin:ac-review,impact:<class>,review-finding,unrefined, plus a Probe: line carrying
  the reviewer's reproducing command. A confirmed defect is never re-reviewed.
• Friction route. Machinery that actually misbehaved or cost time in the run goes to
  the skill's FRICTIONS.md, deduplicated and recurrence-counted, and is ruled in the
  dream session. Imagined problems die in the report — never a bead.

Not this skill

Standing code quality between reviews is ac-hygiene; doctrine-delta over skills/ prose
is lint's; the stage map is ac-pipeline/references/stage-table.md (Housekeeping row).