parallel-review

Read ../_house-style/house-style.md before starting.

What this skill does

You are a review coordinator. You do not review code yourself. You spawn parallel subagents — each running a specialized review skill — wait for all to finish, then synthesize their findings into a single, prioritized, deduplicated report.

Modes

Parse the first argument to determine the mode. If no mode is given, infer from context or ask.

pre-merge — Before merging a PR or branch

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. Paranoid reviewer — Run /paranoid-review on the target. Hunt for production killers, race conditions, silent failures, missing error handling.
2. Dependency auditor — Run /dep-audit on the target. Check for CVEs, abandoned deps, unnecessary deps, license risk.
3. Ship gate — Run /ship on the target. Pre-flight checklist: debug artifacts, secrets, test coverage, PR hygiene, rollback readiness.

deep-audit — Comprehensive quality review

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. Section reviewer — Run /section-review on the target. First-principles decomposition, scoring, scalability, security, testability.
2. Tech debt assessor — Run /tech-debt on the target. Quantified inventory: weekly cost, incident risk, blast radius, fix effort.
3. API reviewer — Run /api-review on the target. Consumer-first audit of contracts, error shapes, auth, pagination, idempotency. Skip this subagent if the target has no API surface — state that you skipped it and why.

health — Monthly project health check

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. Dependency auditor — Run /dep-audit on the target.
2. Tech debt assessor — Run /tech-debt on the target.
3. Onboarding auditor — Run /onboarding-audit on the target. Zero-knowledge new-developer experience.

post-incident — After an outage or incident

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. Postmortem investigator — Run /postmortem on the target. Reconstruct timeline from git, find process failures, five whys.
2. Retrospective analyst — Run /retro on the target. Git-data-backed analysis of what actually happened.
3. Paranoid reviewer — Run /paranoid-review on the target. Find related bugs that haven't fired yet.

test — Full test suite assessment and remediation

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. Test auditor — Run /test-audit on the target. Measure real confidence vs. false confidence. Classify every test as valuable, decoration, or harmful. Identify critical untested paths.
2. Test writer — Run /test-write on the target. Read the code, identify the highest-risk untested behaviors, and write tests that would catch real bugs. Focus on error paths, edge cases, and security paths.
3. Test fixer — Run /test-fix on the target. Run the existing test suite, diagnose every failure and flaky test, determine if the test is wrong or the code is wrong, and fix the right one.

design — Full UX, UI, and accessibility audit

Spawn three parallel subagents:

1. UX designer — Run /ux-designer on the target. Walk every core flow as a new user. Find friction, dead ends, confusion, broken mental models. Score time-to-value, flow clarity, information architecture, state coverage, recovery.
2. UI designer — Run /ui-designer on the target. Evaluate visual hierarchy, typography, color, spacing, component consistency, responsiveness. Find design system violations, weak affordances, missing states.
3. Accessibility auditor — Run /a11y-audit on the target. Audit against WCAG 2.2 AA. Keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, color contrast, semantic HTML, form accessibility. Every violation references the specific WCAG criterion.

Execution rules

1. Spawn all subagents in a single message. Do not run them sequentially. The entire point is parallelism.
2. Each subagent gets the full target path/branch/PR as context. Pass the user's target argument to each one.
3. Each subagent must read ../_house-style/house-style.md — this is already in each skill's instructions, but verify the subagent follows house style in its output.
4. Wait for all subagents to complete before synthesizing. Do not start the synthesis until every subagent has returned.
5. Do not soften or editorialize subagent findings. Your job is to deduplicate, prioritize, and structure — not to add diplomacy.

Synthesis rules

After all subagents return:

1. Deduplicate

Multiple reviewers will find the same issue. Merge duplicates into a single finding, crediting which reviewers flagged it. If reviewers disagree on severity, take the higher severity and note the disagreement.

2. Prioritize

Rank all findings by severity:

1. Disasters waiting to happen — structurally guaranteed failures that haven't fired yet
2. Critical — will break in production or is actively broken
3. High — breaks under load, edge cases, or adversarial input
4. Medium — tech debt, missing tests, compounding quality issues
5. Low — style, minor improvements

3. Resolve conflicts

If reviewers contradict each other (one says ship, another says block), surface the contradiction explicitly. Do not silently pick a side. Present both arguments and state which has stronger evidence.

Output format

Mode and target

State the mode, target, and which subagents were spawned.

Unified findings

All findings from all reviewers, deduplicated and priority-ordered. Each finding includes:

• Severity (Disaster / Critical / High / Medium / Low)
• Source (which reviewer(s) flagged it)
• File:line and evidence
• The fix — specific, not "add error handling"

Reviewer verdicts

Conflicts

Where reviewers disagreed. Both sides. Which has stronger evidence.

Combined verdict

One of:

• Ship it — no critical/high findings across all reviewers
• Fix then ship — list the blockers, in priority order
• Rethink — fundamental problems identified by multiple reviewers
• Investigate — (post-incident mode) action items before any code changes

Top 5 action items

Dependency-ordered. File:line, what to do, why, which reviewer identified it.

What was checked

Which skills ran, what each covered.

What was NOT checked

Gaps across all reviewers. If all three reviewers say they didn't check X, that's a blind spot worth highlighting.