manufacture-review-independence git:20260809.e9e787bA

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---
name: manufacture-review-independence
description: >
  Use when reviewing your own work, or when the author-equals-reviewer guard
  is deliberately overridden — real independence is gone, so manufacture it:
  parallel independently-scoped sub-reviews plus an adversarial re-read of
  source for every high-severity claim, and treat cross-reviewer disagreement
  as a pointer to the boundary file that settles it. Triggers on "self-review",
  "review my own PR", "author is the reviewer", "no one else can review",
  "code review my changes", and conflicting review findings.
---

# Manufacture Review Independence

**Type:** Open-source — client-agnostic methodology, no project-specific detail.

**Created by akbarsha — https://github.com/iamakbarsha1**

Distilled from self-review situations where the author was also the reviewer,
and from parallel reviewers giving conflicting severities because the deciding
file sat outside both their scopes.

**Licence:** Released under CC BY 4.0 — share and adapt for any purpose with
credit. Full text: `LICENSE` at the repository root.

**Feedback & Support:** If a rule here proves wrong or needs sharpening,
open an issue on the repository or contact the author at the profile link
above. If the problem is the agent not following a rule below rather than
the rule itself, that's an execution failure — acknowledge and correct it.

## The core rule

A review's value comes from independence. When author and reviewer are the
same (or the same model, same context, same session), that independence is
gone and leniency creeps in. Don't pretend the review is independent —
MANUFACTURE independence structurally: split the work into independently-
scoped sub-reviews, run an adversarial pass whose job is to refute each
high-severity claim by re-reading the source, and when two views disagree,
resolve it by reading the file that decides — never by averaging.

## Checks

- **Split into independently-scoped sub-reviews.** Instead of one lenient pass
  over everything, review in separate scoped passes (security, correctness,
  contract-boundaries, tests) each blind to the others' conclusions, then
  merge. Different scopes surface what a single sympathetic read glosses over.
- **Adversarially re-read source for every high-severity claim.** For each
  High/Critical finding, run a pass whose explicit goal is to REFUTE it by
  reading the actual code, and default to "not real" if the source doesn't
  confirm it. This kills both the author's blind spots and plausible-but-false
  findings. A claim that survives a genuine refutation attempt is worth
  acting on.
- **Disagreement points to the boundary file — go read it.** When two
  reviewers (or two passes) assign conflicting severity to the same fact, that
  gap is not noise to average away; it means the deciding evidence lives in a
  file NEITHER of them fully read. Identify that boundary file, read it, and
  let it settle the call. *(Two parallel reviewers rated the same issue High
  and Low; the truth lived in a shared module outside both their assigned
  scopes — reading it resolved the conflict decisively.)*

## Pre-flight check — before you trust a self-review

- [ ] The review ran as multiple independently-scoped passes, not one
      sympathetic read.
- [ ] Every High/Critical finding survived an adversarial re-read of the
      actual source (or was dropped).
- [ ] Any cross-reviewer disagreement was resolved by reading the deciding
      boundary file, not by averaging severities.

If any box is unchecked, the review inherited the author's blind spots — go
manufacture the independence.