Review Severity

Two Tiers

• Every review finding is blocking or advisory
• The test is behavioral — does fixing the finding change what an agent or the pipeline does?
• Blocking: the fix changes behavior or closes a contract gap
• Advisory: the fix changes only presentation

Blocking — Gates the Merge

• Correctness and security defects
• Policy-contract violations: a carve-out's unmet preconditions, no-secrets, ci-safety gate-evasion, surface-sync that breaks publish
• A rule directive whose violation changes agent behavior
• A style finding whose fix changes meaning — an atomic-bullet split that alters what the bullet directs

Advisory — Never Gates

• Pure prose and style: connective or em-dash placement, a presentation-only atomic-bullet split
• CHANGELOG wording, naming taste, synonym preference
• Anything whose fix changes only presentation, not behavior

Gating Predicate

• Any blocking finding present → the reviewer posts CHANGES_REQUESTED and the merge gates
• Only advisory findings → the reviewer posts COMMENTED and the merge is allowed
• The policy reviewer's posted state already encodes this — the event is derived from per-finding severity (see the skills/onboard-repo/templates/post-review.sh header; consumers carry a copy at .github/codex-review/post-review.sh)
• The merge watcher gates on the policy reviewer's or a gating lane's CHANGES_REQUESTED, and on any reviewer's outside every lane (see skills/release/watch-pr-reviews.sh header)
• Each verdict is read per review lane, never per login (skills/release/review-lanes.sh)
• A CHANGES_REQUESTED outside every lane in skills/release/review-lanes.sh, human or bot (Copilot), gates until resolved through review (rules/ci-safety.md Never Skip Tests)
• The Claude quality lane is advisory until an ADR superseding docs/adr/0014-retire-copilot-lane.md promotes it

Judge-Accepted Defect Carve-Out

• Narrow exception for shipping with a blocking finding still open
• Applies when a fix loop did not converge and the pinned judge's diagnosis answers it with REMEDY: stop
• Preconditions (all required):
  1. The task's current exhaustion carries a recorded stop diagnosis under skills/herdr-teamlead/references/team-operation.md Judge Seat
  2. The remaining blocking finding is recorded as a tracked accepted defect with its issue reference
  3. The shipped scope excludes that defect's work, and what ships carries no other blocking finding
  4. Every other release gate holds: CI green, the external reviews, and independent reviewer and tester passes on the shipped tip
• The operator overrides a stop like any ruling, by authorizing a plan over it
• Every other blocking finding is fixed before merge

Split Reading From Acting

• Read every finding in full first — severity never licenses skipping a body (see rules/reviewer-feedback-reading.md)
• Blocking → fix before merge
• Advisory → acknowledge
• Fold an advisory in only when a blocking round is already happening
• Otherwise defer the advisory to a follow-up PR or issue and reference it from the current PR
• Never burn a dedicated re-review round on a lone advisory