v2.4.2 — Reviewer audited against its own token rule

reviewer.md grew 2,894 → 5,972 tokens in v2.4.0 and loads on every review — the worst token regression of that release, and the one file not held to the rule the same release added to CLAUDE.md: an addition must earn its tokens against one of the seven objectives.

Now 5,614. 358 tokens removed, zero rules removed.

Verified identical before and after: every PE/RD/CD identifier · all six hard gates · all nine Security Deep-Dive sections · the scoring bands · the output block.

What went — all duplication or prose restating a rule stated elsewhere:

• Language-Specific Checks restated the specialist mandate and version policy carried by references/languages/<language>.md, the file the Reviewer loads moments later. Now a pointer plus the two severities that file does not assign.
• Design & Durability's closing paragraph restated the slop/overengineering table twelve lines above it.
• Reuse & Duplication restated the jscpd command that quality-gate-reference.md owns.
• Principal Engineer Standard and the Correctness procedure compressed, without losing a property, a step, or a severity.

What stayed on purpose — the three lines in the closing Rules: block repeating the cost test, the linter rule and the idiom rule. Terminal repetition of the governing constraint is load-bearing for adherence in a long agent prompt; trading that for ~90 tokens is the wrong side of quality-over-speed.

Measured context: per-story guidance load is ~27k tokens, QA + Reviewer being 45% of it — the confidence and validation the objectives rank first and second. That share was audited for duplication, not trimmed for size.

Plugin versions: coding-pipeline 2.4.2