council-review

Council Review Skill

Domain knowledge for orchestrating multi-agent review councils with structured deliberation protocols.

Use For

• Running /cc-council reviews with appropriate protocol selection
• Configuring council members, weights, and voting thresholds
• Understanding when to use each deliberation protocol
• Interpreting council scores and making go/no-go decisions
• Setting up auto-fix pipelines with confidence thresholds
• Integrating council reviews into CI/CD pipelines

Protocol Selection Guide

Decision Tree

What are you reviewing?
├── Security-sensitive code (auth, payments, secrets)
│   └── Use: red-blue-team --preset security
├── Architecture or design decision
│   └── Use: six-thinking-hats --preset architecture
├── Small PR (<100 lines)
│   └── Use: rapid-fire --preset quick
├── Large PR (>500 lines, multi-file)
│   └── Use: blackboard --preset full
├── Contentious change (team disagreement)
│   └── Use: delphi --preset standard
└── Regular code change
    └── Use: expert-panel --preset standard

Protocol Comparison

Protocol	Rounds	Agent Interaction	Token Cost	Quality	Speed
rapid-fire	1	None	Low	Good	Fast
expert-panel	1-2	After analysis	Medium	High	Medium
blackboard	Async	Shared space	Medium	High	Medium
red-blue-team	2	Adversarial	High	Very High	Slow
six-thinking-hats	6 views	Structured	High	Very High	Slow
delphi	2-3	Anonymous	Highest	Highest	Slowest

Orchestration Best Practices

Fan-Out / Fan-In

• Always spawn all agents in a single message for true parallelism
• Each agent gets scoped context — only the files/info they need
• Use run_in_background: false so results come back synchronously
• Handle partial failures: if 3/4 agents respond, proceed with 3

Context Scoping

Giving each agent the minimum viable context:

• Reduces token cost by 40-60%
• Improves finding quality (less noise to filter)
• Prevents agents from commenting outside their specialty

Weight Calibration

Default weights reflect review importance:

code-reviewer:         1.0  (always relevant)
security-reviewer:     0.9  (high impact, veto power)
architecture-reviewer: 0.9  (structural decisions matter)
test-strategist:       0.8  (coverage critical for confidence)
performance-analyst:   0.7  (important but often subjective)
accessibility-reviewer: 0.6 (important for frontend)
api-reviewer:          0.6  (important for API changes)
dependency-auditor:    0.6  (important for supply chain)
docs-reviewer:         0.5  (lower weight, rarely blocks)

Veto Power

• Only security-reviewer and secrets-scanner have default veto
• Veto triggers on: critical finding + confidence >= 0.8
• Veto overrides weighted voting — always results in changes-requested
• Rationale: security issues must never be approved by majority vote

Consensus Detection

When 2+ agents flag the same file+line range:

• Boost confidence by 1.2x
• Mark as "consensus" in report (stronger signal)
• These findings are almost always valid

Conflict Resolution

When agents disagree on severity:

• Lead agent (if designated) has tie-breaking authority
• Otherwise: higher-weight agent's assessment wins
• Always report the conflict with both perspectives

Scoring System

Scope Independence

Each scope (security, quality, performance, etc.) is scored independently on a 0-100 scale. This prevents a strong quality score from masking a weak security score.

Deduction Tables

Findings map to deductions via category lookup tables. The deduction is multiplied by the finding's confidence score, so low-confidence findings have proportionally less impact.

Scoring Modes

Weighted (default): Scope scores are combined using configurable weights. Good for overall quality assessment where trade-offs are acceptable.

Pass-fail: Each scope must independently meet its threshold. Good for compliance and gating — no scope can compensate for another.

Highest-concern: Overall score equals the weakest scope. Most conservative mode — forces attention to the weakest area.

Auto-Fix Guidelines

When to Auto-Fix

• Formatting and style issues (confidence typically 0.95+)
• Import organization (high confidence, mechanical)
• Type annotations (when TypeScript can infer)
• Simple null checks (optional chaining additions)

When NOT to Auto-Fix

• Business logic changes (too context-dependent)
• Architecture refactoring (requires human judgment)
• Test modifications (risk of masking real failures)
• Migration files (must be append-only)
• Generated files (will be overwritten)

Safety Checks

After auto-fix:

1. Run --fix-dry-run first to preview changes
2. Auto-fix respects skip_patterns in config
3. Post-fix validation: lint + typecheck
4. If validation fails: revert the fix, report as "fix-failed"

CI/CD Integration

Pre-Merge Gate

# In CI pipeline:
/cc-council . --preset pre-merge --format json --changed-only > council-result.json
# Check exit code: 0=approved, 1=changes-requested, 2=error

Quality Gate Thresholds

Recommended thresholds by environment:

Development:  --threshold 0.5  (permissive, speed over safety)
Staging:      --threshold 0.7  (balanced)
Production:   --threshold 0.85 (strict)
Compliance:   --threshold 0.9 --scoring pass-fail (audit-grade)

State Machine & Resume

The council saves state at each phase boundary. If a phase fails (e.g., network timeout during fan-out), you can resume from the last checkpoint:

/cc-council --resume <session-id>

State includes:

• Council plan (members, protocol, scopes)
• Raw agent outputs (findings + votes)
• Deliberation results (consensus, conflicts)
• Score calculations

This means you never lose work from a partially completed council.