Spec Reviewers Gate

The Spec Reviewers protocol (skills/references/reviewers.md) governs the parallel review gate executed during design before handing off to plan.

Trigger-Based Selection

Reviewers are selected dynamically based on spec characteristics:

Trigger Condition	Reviewer Dispatched	Charter
Always (baseline)	spec-compliance	Verifies contract completeness, unambiguous test criteria, and non-narrative formatting.
State transitions / async	state-machine	Checks state-machine completeness, illegal transitions, timeout, and race conditions.
Cross-rule / multiple specs	cross-rule	Verifies consistency across system rules, existing specs, and project invariants.
Spans modules / repos	cross-module	Verifies contract boundaries, schema compatibility, and dependency ordering.
Crash / recovery / persistence	safety	Checks crash recovery, data loss prevention, idempotent retries, and rollback safety.
Implementation complexity	implementability	Evaluates whether tasks can be executed cleanly within estimated scope without hidden ambiguities.

Parallel Execution & Coordinator Synthesis

1. Parallel Dispatch: All triggered reviewers run concurrently as independent subagents.
2. Coordinator Synthesis: The primary agent evaluates reviewer findings critically, resolves conflicts, identifies gaps, judges severity, and applies fixes to the spec in a single pass. Reviewers advise; coordinator decides.