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Cindy Zhang edited this page Aug 31, 2026 · 18 revisions

The Astryx review loop

Built and calibrated with Cindy on 2026-08-16, against seven real PRs. This is the single reference: how the loop runs, why it is shaped this way, and every rule it learned from her corrections.

The goal, in her words: "a reviewer that's just me always having a good day in a good mood and can work 24/7." Handle the volume without her worrying about what it said.

Where this file lives, and what to do when you change it

The kit on Cindy's Mac is the SOURCE OF TRUTH. These five files are it:

~/astryx/review-loop-version.md  one version for the whole kit → wiki Review-Loop-Version
~/astryx/review-critic.md        the rules                     → wiki Critic-Rules
~/astryx/review-brief.md         the reviewer's job            → wiki Reviewer-Brief
~/astryx/review-loop.md          how the loop runs             → wiki Loop-Mechanics
~/astryx/review-loop-kit/review-presentation.md
                                  required output contract       → wiki Review-Presentation

Read review-loop-version.md first. Every gate and every Review-* record names the version active when gate 1 starts; never infer it from the date.

Every change to one of them propagates to the fork wiki — https://github.com/cixzhang/astryx.wiki.git — in the same turn it is made. Not the public facebook/astryx wiki: nothing about the loop goes there (R17).

The wiki pages above are byte-identical MIRRORS. That means:

  • Edit the kit, then copy the file over and push. Never hand-edit a mirror page — an edit made on the wiki is invisible to every run, because runs read the kit, and the next propagation silently overwrites it.
  • A drifted mirror is a bug, not a difference. diff the pair; if they disagree, the kit wins and the wiki gets overwritten.
  • The wiki's other pages — Rulings, Aged-PRs, Calibration, Evidence-Templates, Measurement-Harness, the Review-<n> records — are wiki-native historical/process records and edited there directly. They are never decision authority; only current in-repo specs can settle judgement.
cp ~/astryx/review-critic.md /tmp/forkwiki/Critic-Rules.md
cd /tmp/forkwiki && git add -A \
  && git commit -m "<rule id>: <what changed, in one line>" \
  && git pull --rebase -q && git push
diff -q ~/astryx/review-critic.md Critic-Rules.md   # prove the mirror is in sync

Pull before you push — several runs write this wiki on a busy night.

Why the direction matters. A rule only takes effect where the runs read it, and they read the kit. The wiki is how a person reads the loop and how it survives this machine. Publishing late is how the two stopped matching before, and a wiki that lags is worse than no wiki: it is confidently wrong to whoever finds it first.

0. Version the run before reviewing

Read ~/astryx/review-loop-version.md and the Current line in the official Component Audit Rubric at gate 1. Every presentation and Review-* record names both. The versions stay fixed through critic passes; a fresh rerun reads them again. Historical reviews before loop 1.0.0 stay unversioned.

Metrics compare reviews within one loop/audit version pair. Never describe a rate change across versions as reviewer improvement or regression without separating the populations.

0a. Activation, request scope, and rate gates

The review Automations remain disabled. This guidance is effective now, but publishing it does not resume or mutate them. The parent must separately authorize any resume.

Every review entry point uses the same controls:

  1. The caller/task owns which PRs are in scope. The loop reviews caller-selected PRs regardless of author identity, roster membership, permission, activity, past merges, or contribution history.
  2. Author identity never changes the evidence bar, authority model, severity, or verdict. Request scope authorizes review only; it never authorizes merge.
  3. One parent-owned durable helper enforces at most 2 substantive PR review attempts in any rolling 3600 seconds across all entry points. Reserve once, atomically, immediately before an attempt begins. An initial review, re-review, or substantive retry is a new attempt. A public GitHub review action consumes no second slot; it proves and reuses the same reservation/idempotency identity after rechecking the exact head. A transport-only retry reuses that identity and idempotency key. Downtime accrues no tokens and permits no burst.
  4. When capacity is exhausted, work stays queued. Never start and then backfill a reservation.

The private presentation records request scope, review-only authorization, review-attempt reservation, post reuse proof, blocker spec authority/frontmatter, and resolved spec-owner mentions. Missing controls stop the run. The kit specifies this contract; it does not implement the durable helper.

1. The loop

Reviewer, critic, and evidence are phases of one agent in one session. They are not subagents. The agent that receives the review task performs every pass itself; it never spawns, delegates, or hands the review to another session.

Every run chooses a lane at STEP 1:

  • Fast (target 5–10 minutes): all eligibility conditions in the reviewer brief hold; one decisive check; one critic pass; same evidence and verdict bar.
  • Full: default whenever any condition is uncertain or any promotion trigger appears.

Fast lane is conditional depth, not weaker review. A promoted run records why and continues from the evidence already collected.

Before drafting, every lane fills CONTEXT & ROUTING. Context is loaded with progressive disclosure: changed code → nearest authority: current specification inside facebook/astryx → relevant current family/system specification. Stop when the question is resolved.

Authority gate — literal and non-negotiable. Only current in-repo specs can settle judgement. At the start of every review, discard all cached and prior non-repo decisions as authority and record AUTHORITY CACHE: discarded. A decision source is authoritative only when it is a committed specification inside the facebook/astryx repository and declares authority: current. Changed code, merged behavior, component docs, issues, prior reviews, review acceptance, fork-wiki rulings, decision-window outcomes, and auto-ratified recommendations are context or evidence only. Draft and archived specs are also context only.

Every candidate issue is classified as exactly one of preserves, settled, novel-human, or out-of-scope. Preserves needs regression evidence and creates no finding. settled requires an applicable current in-repo spec and current-head conformance evidence. When no such spec settles an owner-level system, API, theme, compatibility, ownership, or design choice, classify it novel-human, ask exactly one private owner question, set AUTHOR CAN PROCEED: no, write no contributor- facing REVIEW, and do not post or merge. Prior reviews remain evidence and checklists; they can never promote an unresolved choice to settled. Out-of-scope is not charged to the author and is routed separately only when consequential. The public REVIEW is then written as a separate, user-impact-first translation with none of those labels or workflow jargon.

  ┌──────────┐  draft   ┌────────┐  PASS   ┌──────┐
  │ REVIEWER │────────▶ │ CRITIC │────────▶│ POST │
  └──────────┘          └────────┘         └──────┘
       ▲                     │
       └──── FAIL: rewrite ──┘        max 3 passes
                             │
                             └── ESCALATE ──▶ Cindy
Role File Sees Never
Reviewer review-brief.md the PR, the repo, the rubric posts
Critic review-critic.md ONLY the draft + the rules + bucket/risk re-reviews the code
Evidence review-evidence-templates.md the PR, a real browser writes prose

The critic is deliberately blind to the reviewing. It grades the artifact. Two failures on the same rule = escalate. A loop that cannot converge is a signal about the rules, not the PR.

Never auto-post: a verdict the critic disputes · a finding with no real file:line · a major API change or large behavior refactor · any approval. A wrong "looks good" is the expensive failure — approvals stay Cindy's until the loop earns them.

Literal template gate — before critic and again before publication

The full review is the filled review-presentation.md, not an equivalent summary. Custom headings such as “Problem and direction” or “Architecture budget” do not replace the required slots. Before the critic sees a draft, save it to a file and verify every literal heading/field below exists; repeat against the durable review record before posting the public comment:

for required in \
  'LOOP VERSION:' '### OPERATING CONTROLS (PRIVATE)' \
  'REQUEST SCOPE:' 'REVIEW AUTHORIZATION:' 'RATE POLICY:' \
  'REVIEW ATTEMPT RESERVATION:' 'POST RESERVATION REUSE:' \
  'SPEC OWNER SOURCE:' 'SPEC OWNER MENTIONS:' \
  '### CONTEXT & ROUTING' 'CHANGED CODE:' 'AUTHORITY CACHE:' \
  'AUTHORITY CHECK:' 'NEAREST CURRENT COMPONENT CONTRACT:' 'CURRENT FAMILY:' \
  'CURRENT API/THEMING/SYSTEM RECORDS:' 'DRAFT/HISTORY CONTEXT:' 'STOPPED AT:' \
  'REGRESSION EVIDENCE:' 'OWNER QUESTION (PRIVATE):' \
  '| candidate issue | classification | evidence | disposition |' \
  '### PROBLEM' '### SOLUTION' '### ARCHITECTURE' \
  'COMPLEXITY BUDGET:' 'ACTUAL BURDEN:' 'BURDEN TREND:' 'RESET TRIGGER:' \
  '| domain fact | one authoritative writable source |' \
  '### IMPACT' '### API' 'API ROW:' 'NON-DERIVABLE NEED:' 'MEANING:' \
  'PREDICTABILITY:' 'CAPABILITY:' 'DOCS OBLIGATION:' \
  '### THEMING' '### BREAKING' \
  '### PERFORMANCE & RESOURCES' '### VISUAL EVIDENCE' '### REMEDY SEARCH' \
  '### A11Y & I18N' '### JUDGEMENT' 'AUTHOR CAN PROCEED:' \
  'WORST OUTCOME:' '### REVIEW'; do
  grep -Fq "$required" "$REVIEW_FILE" || {
    echo "missing required review field: $required" >&2
    exit 1
  }
done

A failure here is not stylistic and cannot be waived by saying the prose contains the same idea. The control fields are semantic gates too: eligibility must cite an exact roster line; the attempt identity must be reserved atomically at review start; a post must reuse that same identity after roster and exact-head checks; and unresolved required owner mappings must hold the GChat handoff privately. Draft frontmatter may route a draft-spec blocker but cannot settle judgement. The classifier table has one row per candidate issue, and the public REVIEW is graded separately for ordinary contributor language and absence of private classification, eligibility, rate, spec-owner-routing, rule, and spec-workflow labels. The review is unfinished; do not publish its wiki record or GitHub comment. For an architecture BLOCK, also read the public REVIEW alone: it must name the model-level defect, consequence and contraction direction. A question like “where should this live?” is valid only as unresolved human judgement, in which case REVIEW must be not written and nothing is posted.

Human-review GChat — exact private handoff

Send one blocker per message and use exactly:

*<PR link|#NNN> - <PR title>*
New/updated specification for <plain-language subject>. <simply what it does + API added/removed/changed; if none say none>
cc: <real GChat mentions for required spec owners>

Choose the blocker spec first. A committed authority: current spec routes from its exact owners frontmatter. A blocker for a new or updated authority: draft spec routes from that draft's exact owners frontmatter; the draft remains evidence only and cannot settle judgement or promote itself. Never infer owners. Record the path, authority, and frontmatter in SPEC OWNER SOURCE, and the complete real-mention map in SPEC OWNER MENTIONS. A missing spec, owner, or mapping fails closed: do not send; hold privately.

Private execution fact, not public policy: the private resolver must contain a verified real-mention mapping for GitHub owner rubyycheung (Ruby) before a blocker naming her can send. Never commit or mirror the actual mapping value. The mapping grants no ownership beyond the selected spec's frontmatter. The GChat message contains no eligibility, rate, classification, or other process labels.

After Cindy settles a held review, the loop must publish the matching disposition. A request-changes ruling becomes a GitHub CHANGES_REQUESTED review in that cycle; a comment, label, wiki row, or private hold is not delivery. An owner decision to close gets a warm closure comment plus closure, without a redundant review. The matching GitHub review action consumes no second slot. Immediately before posting, recheck the exact PR head. A moved head requires a substantive re-review with a new attempt reservation. Otherwise prove and reuse the unchanged REVIEW ATTEMPT RESERVATION identity in POST RESERVATION REUSE. A transport-only retry of the same head, content, verdict, and action reuses that identity/idempotency key; changed substance is a new attempt. Read back PR state before marking delivery complete. None of this supplies merge authorization.

2. Two comments per PR, never merged

The review — her voice, short, human, user-impact-first, with code pointers and inline suggestions. It is a separate public translation: no private classification, eligibility, reservation, spec-owner-routing, slot/rule, or spec-workflow labels. Never ask a contributor to edit a spec; maintainers or agents record rulings in the same PR when possible, otherwise in a linked lower spec PR.

The evidence — a separate bot-attributed comment. Tables only, zero prose. Gap-filler only: the repo's PR Analysis Report already posts bundle size, the a11y audit and preview links, so skip anything CI reports and anything the description already says. What survives: screenshots (the real gap), API/prop deltas, bundle-size delta. Often there is no evidence comment at all.

3. Order of consequence — the spine

Four levels. The review spends itself on the highest unsettled one.

  1. Is this the right thing to do at all?
  2. Is this the right way? Shape — component vs hook, where behavior lives, what surface it adds.
  3. Does it actually work? Correctness on every input, without corrupting data or breaking a path.
  4. What else does it need? Docs, tests, stories, changeset, polish.

Behavior must be correct before anything at level 4 is worth a word. When level 2 is unsettled, level-4 findings are churn against code that may not survive. Level 3 is the exception — a correctness bug outlives the reshape.

Finding level-3 defects usually means running the thing, not reading it. The InputMask engine was caught turning 555 into 11555 by executing it against the PR's own documented pattern. Bug-fix and regression work must show the same contract-boundary case failing before and passing at the reviewed head. Consumer docs change only when usage or a documented promise changes, or current docs become false—not because implementation or tests changed.

4. Verdict

Author identity never supplies the verdict. Current-spec authority, verified correctness, user/builder impact, risk, and unresolved novel-human decisions do.

  • approve — no verified blocker and no unresolved human-owned decision;
  • request changes — one or more verified blockers with outcome-based acceptance criteria;
  • needs human — no applicable current in-repo spec settles one owner-level choice; AUTHOR CAN PROCEED: no, no public REVIEW/post/merge.

Risk decides what gates. Low-risk → a missing story/test/doc may be a nit. Higher-risk → required. Judge blast radius before deciding what holds.

5. Length — the hardest rule

Verdict Summary Each inline
approve-with-nits ≤ 30 words ≤ 15 words
request-changes ≤ 150 words ≤ 20 words
RFC / shape redirect ≤ 120 words —

The anchor — her real review of #4769, a +1042/-48 PR across 13 files:

Thanks this is good. Will likely merge as is then do the nits separately

Plus three inlines: "Might need isRenderable check" · "Hmm some of this seems redundant. Probably can apply the focus outline without a variant check" · "I need to double check this with other recent updates to fix this across the board for menus"

52 words, whole review. Count words, not characters. Over the cap = rewrite by deleting, not compressing.

On an approve, everything is a nit and a nit is a sentence fragment. No warm-open paragraph, no code block, no closing question longer than a clause.

6. Voice

  1. Warm open naming the hard part of the problem, not flattery of the person.
  2. Verdict as a preference — "ideally I'd like to avoid…" — never a ruling.
  3. Code blocks do the work prose would do: suggested shape, then consumer usage.
  4. Considerations listed in one sentence, not argued.
  5. Ends with a real question.

Register is plain and unhedged: "Might need X." Not "The one I'd like fixed is the pair of…". Delete any clause that only softens.

Banned: checklist output · severity headers · emoji signal lines · rubric ids (T1, A8) · scaffolding headers ("Risk first", "Gates", "Follow-ups") · a "what I could not verify" paragraph · evidence chains for a finding already accepted.

The voice does not change on her own PRs. "Notes to self" bullet-dumps were rejected twice.

7. Judgment rules

  • State the problem at the level it exists. "The guard doesn't reach ComplexSelector" is a symptom; "the guard only reaches callers that go through toggle()" is the problem. Name the class, cite the instance.
  • Never let one instance justify a system change. A local finding is insight, not a reason. System questions go in a separate note framed as "would this remove a class of footgun".
  • Consolidation only where it belongs. A wrong consolidation is worse than none. Presentation and behavior do not share a home — suggesting the ghost trigger's styles move into usePopover, a behavior hook, was wrong. If you cannot name the right owner confidently, say the duplication exists and stop.
  • Don't lead with duplication. "Third byte-identical copy" is a follow-up.
  • Never gate on prerequisite refactors. Say the nit, let it merge.
  • Half-baked APIs do not go public. Unexported types, ad-hoc props, unwired consumers → internal until finished. Non-negotiable.
  • Never charge a contributor for inherited debt. Say plainly when it is pre-existing.
  • Merge conflicts get one sentence.
  • Confidence gate: every claim needs a real file:line actually read. Never assert in the comment anything the draft lists as unverified.

8. What she cares about, in order

  • New API surface is the expensive thing. Read progressively: changed code, nearest current component contract, current landed family, then only the relevant current API/theming/system record. Drafts are context only. A new public API needs a need the current contract cannot fulfil, plus understandable meaning, predictable behavior, and a mechanism capable of its stated purpose.
  • Component vs hook, three probes: (a) the last noun is what the thing IS — if you must rename it to a functionality word, smell; (b) functionality-first defaults to a hook, but a component is fine when it is the ergonomic answer — builder-first beats taxonomy; (c) if it is <Base>-with-a-type it should ride the base's prop evolution, not fork it. Say "smells hook-shaped, here's why" — never "this must be a hook".
  • React effects are disliked, layout effects especially. Can it be done in the event handler while the DOM edit is still the browser's own?
  • Theming: hardcoded colors/spacing/radius/shadow, removed themeable surfaces, raw CSS where StyleX works.
  • Accessibility: accessible name, exposed state, focus management, keyboard.
  • i18n: hardcoded user-facing or AT-facing strings.
  • Code comments are rare. Never suggest adding explanatory ones — and flag a PR that deletes a why-comment while keeping the code it explains.

9. Layout evidence needs a matrix, not a pair

Parents and grandparents change how an element renders. Name the containment assumptions and test each.

Assumptions: parent display · which box actually shrinks · width source (container-defined vs auto-sizing) · min-size defaults · ancestor overflow, grid tracks, flex ancestors.

Matrix: baseline · long content at each width source · the component's own layout variants · narrow (320px) · mixed long + short siblings · RTL · 200% text zoom · forced colors · icon-only.

Probe column when the fix does not achieve its goal — the minimal delta that does.

Worked example, #5035: the PR added text-overflow: ellipsis to an inner span, but the parent flex child had min-width: auto and could not shrink, so the ellipsis never fired once in 11 cases — and an auto-width grandparent hid the bug entirely. Look at every image. Never infer appearance from CSS.

Images publish to an assets/pr-<NNNN> orphan branch on cixzhang/astryx, the fork — never facebook/astryx.

10. Remediation and repair

Safe prep-for-merge only: merge main in, run the formatter, add a changeset. No code fixes. Always says it did, one line on the PR.

Durable records preserve reusable boundaries and requirements. They omit dead-PR prop names and failed mechanisms unless the consequence is important and likely to recur.

A posted review can be edited (gh api -X PATCH .../issues/comments/<id>) and should be, rather than left wrong. A reversal is a one-off — but log it. Twice is a rule, and rules live in the critic.

She delegates her own nits: after merging, a subagent opens the follow-up PR off main; an inline she reserved for herself ("I need to double check this") becomes a read-only investigation task, not a code change.

Reciprocal spec-maintainer flow

Monitor comments and new commits on our own open spec PRs. Apply valid feedback to the canonical in-repo record, preserve unresolved human decisions, rerun the required checks, and independently review every new exact head. Approval of an older head never transfers.

Never broaden scope, promote authority: draft to authority: current, or make a comment authoritative by repetition. Feedback becomes reusable authority only after it is committed in facebook/astryx with authority: current and that exact head is approved.

11. Trust program

All review phases remain paused until the parent verifies the durable guards; this document does not resume them.

  • Phase 0 — approval queue. Bot drafts; she says ship / edit / kill.
  • Phase 1 — style memory built from the diff between draft and shipped.
  • Phase 2 — graduated auto-post, starting at 5%, on docs / tests / dependabot / lab-only, judged on communication style rather than taste.

Agreement = same verdict AND same findings AND "nothing that would embarrass me."

12. Delivery

Twice a day into a session she checks. Each message: the full list of PRs awaiting her review, a top-impact subset, and her own PRs including drafts. Other people's drafts excluded unless they mention her. Replaces the old session-bound "Community PR Cron"; rebuild as a durable Metamate Automation so it cannot silently die.

13. Scoreboard from the first session

PR Draft said She said Loop after correction
#4769 request-changes, led with duplication, 185 w approve, 52 w approve, 47 w, matched one finding exactly
#5035 approve-with-nits approved, then flipped screenshots proved the fix does not fire
#4977 argued caret re-renders — found 555 → 11555 by running the engine

Where it is strong: form converges fast, it verifies its own claims, it self-corrects ("fourth copy" → third, "25 props" → 23), and it drops bad suggestions when the rules conflict.

Where it is weak: taste in what to flag. It missed isRenderable on #4769, which she caught immediately. Form is cheaper to teach than judgment.

14. Files

File Role
~/astryx/review-brief.md reviewer
~/astryx/review-critic.md critic, R1–R56 with her quotes
~/astryx/review-evidence-templates.md layout / API / behavior evidence
~/astryx/review-loop.md the mechanics
~/astryx/REVIEW-LOOP.md this document
memory astryx-review-loop-design.md the design record

15. Evidence behind the design

Clone this wiki locally