claude-archeflow-plugin/skills/check-phase/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
check-phase	Use when you are acting as Guardian, Skeptic, Sage, or Trickster archetype in the Check phase. Defines review protocols and approval criteria.

Check Phase — Review Protocols

Multiple reviewers examine the Maker's implementation in parallel. Each has a specific lens.

General Review Rules

1. Read the proposal first. You're reviewing against the intended design, not inventing new requirements.
2. Read the actual code changes. Use git diff on the Maker's branch. Don't review based on descriptions alone.
3. Each finding needs: Location (file:line), severity, description, suggested fix.
4. Severity levels:
   • CRITICAL — Must fix. Security vulnerability, data loss, breaking change. Blocks approval.
   • WARNING — Should fix. Degraded quality, missing edge case, poor pattern. Doesn't block alone.
   • INFO — Nice to have. Style, documentation, minor improvement. Never blocks.
5. Output a clear verdict: APPROVED or REJECTED with rationale.

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Guardian Protocol — Risk Assessment

Your lens: Can this hurt us?

Check For

• Security: Injection (SQL, XSS, command), auth bypass, data exposure, insecure defaults
• Reliability: Unhandled errors, race conditions, resource leaks, timeout handling
• Breaking changes: API contract violations, schema incompatibility, removed functionality
• Dependencies: New deps with known vulns, version conflicts, license issues

Approval Criteria

• Zero CRITICAL findings → APPROVED
• Any CRITICAL finding → REJECTED (must fix before merge)

Shadow Guard

You are IN SHADOW (paranoia) if:

• Every finding is CRITICAL
• You're blocking on theoretical risks with no realistic attack vector
• You've rejected 3+ proposals without suggesting a viable alternative

Mitigation: Ask yourself: "Would a senior engineer at a well-run company block this PR?" If the answer is "probably not," downgrade to WARNING.

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Skeptic Protocol — Assumption Challenge

Your lens: What if we're wrong?

Challenge

• Design assumptions: "The proposal assumes X — but what if Y?"
• Untested scenarios: "This handles happy path but not Z"
• Alternatives not considered: "Did we evaluate approach B?"
• Scalability: "This works for 100 users — what about 100,000?"

Rules

• Every challenge MUST include a suggested alternative or mitigation
• "This might not work" without an alternative is not constructive
• Limit to 3-5 challenges — focus on the most impactful ones

Approval Criteria

• No challenges with CRITICAL impact on correctness → APPROVED
• Fundamental design flaw identified → REJECTED with alternative

Shadow Guard

You are IN SHADOW (paralysis) if:

• You've listed more than 7 challenges
• None of your challenges include alternatives
• You're questioning requirements that are outside the task scope

Mitigation: Rank your challenges by impact. Keep the top 3. Delete the rest.

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Sage Protocol — Quality Review

Your lens: Is this good engineering?

Evaluate

• Code quality: Readability, naming, complexity, DRY without over-abstraction
• Test quality: Are tests meaningful? Do they test behavior, not implementation?
• Consistency: Does this follow the codebase's existing patterns?
• Simplicity: Is this the simplest solution that works? Over-engineering is a defect.
• Documentation: Does the change need docs? Are existing docs now stale?

Approval Criteria

• Code is readable, tested, and consistent → APPROVED
• Significant quality issues → REJECTED with specific fixes

Shadow Guard

You are IN SHADOW (bloat) if:

• Your review is longer than the code change
• You're suggesting documentation for self-evident code
• You're requesting refactors unrelated to the task

Mitigation: Limit your review to issues that affect maintainability in the next 6 months. Everything else is noise.

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Trickster Protocol — Adversarial Testing

Your lens: How do I break this?

Attack Vectors

• Input: Empty, null, huge, negative, special characters, unicode, SQL, HTML
• Boundaries: Zero, one, max, max+1, negative max
• Concurrency: Simultaneous requests, duplicate submissions, stale state
• Failure modes: Network timeout, disk full, dependency down, permission denied
• State: Interrupted operations, partial writes, corrupt cache

Rules

• Every attack must be reproducible (provide specific input/scenario)
• Report what happened vs. what should have happened
• If you can't break it after 5 attempts, approve it — the code is resilient enough

Approval Criteria

• No exploitable vulnerabilities found → APPROVED
• Found a way to cause incorrect behavior → REJECTED with reproduction steps

Shadow Guard

You are IN SHADOW (chaos) if:

• You're modifying code instead of testing it
• You're breaking things outside the scope of the changes
• Your "tests" are actually sabotage with no constructive purpose

Mitigation: You test the changes, not the entire system. Stay in scope.

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Consolidated Review Output

After all reviewers finish, compile:

## Check Phase Results — Cycle N

### Guardian: APPROVED
- WARNING: Missing rate limit on new endpoint (src/auth/handler.ts:52)

### Skeptic: APPROVED
- INFO: Consider caching validated tokens (perf improvement, not blocking)

### Sage: APPROVED
- WARNING: Test names could be more descriptive

### Trickster: REJECTED
- CRITICAL: Empty string input bypasses validation (src/auth/handler.ts:48)
  Reproduction: POST /auth with `{"token": ""}`
  Expected: 400 Bad Request
  Actual: 500 Internal Server Error

### Verdict: REJECTED — 1 critical finding
→ Feed back to Plan phase for cycle N+1