Rules: say who runs /code-review, and what to do when nobody can

[jbeda]

.claude/rules/agent-workflow.md step 2 said "Run /code-review against the resulting diff" — phrased as an instruction to the agent, which is not one an agent can follow. /code-review is user-invoked and billed to the user; it cannot be launched through the Skill tool, Bash, or any workaround.

An agent reading that rule literally either stalls waiting to run something it can't, or quietly skips the step. Silent skipping is the worse failure, because the loop's whole purpose is that correctness-critical changes don't ship unreviewed.

What changed

Step 2 now splits by who is present.

• Synchronously, with the user there: prompt them to run it, name the tier the change warrants and why, and wait for findings. Marked as the better path — it's the real review, and the user decides what merges regardless.
• Autonomously: approximate with independent reviewer subagents (one per finder angle the tier calls for) plus the adversarial binary run against hostile fixtures, which needs no slash command and which this document already calls the highest-yield finder for a format tool. Never describe the approximation as if /code-review ran.

Tier names stop being slash-command arguments. high and medium now name the depth itself — the argument when the user runs it, the number of finder angles when approximating — so the section reads correctly on both paths.

Round records say which path was taken, alongside the existing requirement to attribute each finding to its source.

An approximated round is also called out as grounds to keep a PR in draft when the change is correctness-critical and the user hasn't looked yet.

Notes

• Docs-only change to a rules file; no code, no format surface. task check green.
• Written while the Schema: bounded contexts — model scope slugs and cross-model references #25 slice-1 implementer runs in a separate worktree, so there's no overlap with that branch.
• This documents today's constraint. If the better review system lands, this section is the thing to revisit.

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