microsoft/apm-review-panel

APM Review Panel - Fan-Out Advisory Review

The panel is FAN-OUT + SYNTHESIZER. Each persona runs in its own agent thread (via the task tool) and returns JSON matching assets/panelist-return-schema.json. The orchestrator schema-validates each return, hands all returns to the apm-ceo synthesizer (also a task thread, returns JSON matching assets/ceo-return-schema.json), then renders ONE recommendation comment from assets/recommendation-template.md.

This skill is ADVISORY by design. It does not compute a binary verdict, it does not apply verdict labels, and it does not gate merge. The panel surfaces findings; the maintainer and the PR author decide ship.

Architecture invariants

• Advisory regime, not gate regime. There is no APPROVE / REJECT, no panel-approved / panel-rejected label, no deterministic verdict computation. The CEO returns a ship_recommendation.stance (ship_now / ship_with_followups / needs_discussion / needs_rework); this is prose for the human reviewer, never auto-applied as a label or status check. This is the architectural fix for the previous regime's over-strictness: removing the binary gate removes the incentive for panelists to inflate required[] defensively.
• Three severity buckets, none of them gate. Findings carry severity: blocking | recommended | nit. blocking is the highest signal a panelist can send and renders prominently in the comment; it still does not block merge. recommended is the default for substantive feedback. nit is one-line polish. The orchestrator never reads severity to gate anything.
• Single-writer interlock. Only the orchestrator writes to the PR: exactly one add-comment and one remove-labels call. The remove-labels call always sweeps panel-review (trigger idempotency) AND defensively removes panel-approved / panel-rejected if present (legacy verdict labels from the pre-advisory regime; they have no meaning here and would mislead readers if left on a PR after a fresh advisory pass). NO add-labels call -- there are no verdict labels to apply. Panelist subagents and the CEO subagent return JSON only and MUST NOT call any gh write command, post comments, apply labels, or touch the PR state.
• Single-emission discipline. Exactly one comment per panel run, rendered from assets/recommendation-template.md after all subagents return.
• Non-empty turn exit (the run's hard contract). gh-aw decides success by inspecting agent_output AFTER your turn ends: a turn that ends with zero safe outputs (agent_output = {"items":[]}) is detected as a failure, the safe-output detection job is skipped, the add-comment job never runs, and the workflow opens a "No Safe Outputs Generated" issue. Therefore your turn MUST end with at least one safe output -- the rendered comment on success (step 7), or an explicit noop if the run genuinely cannot produce one. NEVER end the turn empty.
• Synchronous fan-out -- never spawn-and-forget. Every task spawn (each panelist AND the CEO synthesizer) is BLOCKING: spawn it, WAIT for its JSON return, then continue. Use the task tool's synchronous mode; do NOT use its background/detached mode -- the variant that returns an agent_id immediately and runs the subagent in the background -- for any panelist or the CEO. Their returns are LOAD-BEARING: the comment cannot be rendered without them. Spawning the CEO (or a panelist) detached and then ending the turn while it is still running is the documented cause of the empty-output failure above.

Agent roster

| Agent | Role | Always active? | |-------|------|----------------| | Python Architect | Architectural Reviewer + supplies mermaid diagrams | Yes | | CLI Logging Expert | Output UX Reviewer | Yes | | DevX UX Expert | Package-Manager UX | Yes | | Supply Chain Security Expert | Threat-Model Reviewer | Yes | | OSS Growth Hacker | Adoption Strategist | Yes | | Auth Expert | Auth / Token Reviewer | Conditional (see below) | | Doc Writer | Documentation Reviewer | Conditional (see below) | | Test Coverage Expert | Test-Presence Reviewer (paired with DevX UX) | Yes (skipped only on docs-only PRs -- see below) | | Performance Expert | Package-Manager Performance Reviewer | Conditional (see below) | | APM CEO | Strategic Arbiter / Synthesizer | Yes |

Topology

   apm-review-panel SKILL (orchestrator thread)
                      |
   FAN-OUT via task tool (panelists in parallel)
                      |
   +-----+-------+-------+-----+-----+------+-----------+----------+
   v     v       v       v     v     v      v           v          v (cond.)
  py    cli     dx-ux   sec   grw   auth   doc-writer  test-cov
   |     |       |       |     |     |      |           |
   |   each returns JSON per panelist-return-schema.json
   +-----+-------+-------+-----+-----+------+-----------+----------+
                      |
                      v   <-- S4 schema-validate
                      v   <-- on malformed: re-spawn that persona
                      v
   task: apm-ceo synthesizer
   - aggregates findings across panelists
   - resolves dissent
   - emits headline + arbitration prose + principle alignment
   - emits curated recommended_followups (prioritized)
   - emits ship_recommendation (stance + prose)
   - returns ceo-return-schema.json
                      |
                      v   <-- S4 schema-validate
                      v
   orchestrator (sole writer)
            |               |
            v               v
        add-comment    remove-labels
        (max:2)        [panel-review,
                        panel-approved,
                        panel-rejected]
                       (trigger reset +
                        legacy verdict sweep)

Conditional panelists

Three personas are conditional (auth, doc-writer, performance-expert). A fourth (test-coverage) is mandatory on every PR that touches src/ and only skipped on documentation-only PRs -- see its section below for why. The orchestrator ALWAYS spawns ALL four tasks to keep the schema return shape uniform; the prompt instructs the subagent to set active: false with an inactive_reason if the condition does not hold.

Auth Expert

Activate when the PR changes any of:

• src/apm_cli/core/auth.py
• src/apm_cli/core/token_manager.py
• src/apm_cli/core/azure_cli.py
• src/apm_cli/deps/github_downloader.py
• src/apm_cli/marketplace/client.py
• src/apm_cli/utils/github_host.py
• src/apm_cli/install/validation.py
• src/apm_cli/install/pipeline.py
• src/apm_cli/deps/registry_proxy.py

Fallback self-check (when no fast-path file matched): "Does this PR change authentication behavior, token management, credential resolution, host classification used by AuthResolver, git or HTTP authorization headers, or remote-host fallback semantics? If unsure, answer YES."

Doc Writer

Activate when the PR changes any of:

• README.md
• CHANGELOG.md
• MANIFESTO.md
• docs/src/content/docs/**
• .apm/skills/**/*.md
• .apm/agents/**/*.md
• .github/skills/**/*.md
• .github/agents/**/*.md
• .github/instructions/**/*.md
• .github/workflows/*.md (gh-aw natural-language workflows)
• packages/apm-guide/**

Fallback self-check (when no fast-path file matched): "Does this PR change user-facing documentation, agent or skill prose, instruction files, CHANGELOG entries, README claims, or any natural-language artifact a reader will rely on? If unsure, answer YES."

When the doc-writer is active and the PR includes documentation changes, the persona reviews them for: (a) consistency with the existing voice and structure, (b) accuracy against the code being changed, (c) completeness for the typical reader (no orphan claims, no missing prerequisites), (d) discoverability (cross-links, sidebar order if Starlight content). When the doc-writer is active because of code changes that SHOULD have updated docs but did not, the persona surfaces that gap as a finding.

Performance Expert

Activate when the PR changes any of:

• src/apm_cli/cache/**
• src/apm_cli/deps/**
• src/apm_cli/install/phases/**
• src/apm_cli/install/pipeline.py
• src/apm_cli/install/resolve.py
• src/apm_cli/utils/**
• src/apm_cli/marketplace/**
• src/apm_cli/compilation/**
• scripts/perf/**
• src/apm_cli/core/command_logger.py (when the diff adds perf-instrumentation logs)

Also activate when:

• The PR description claims a performance win (speedup ratio, latency reduction, bytes-on-disk reduction, throughput improvement) or attaches a perf-harness measurement table.
• The diff introduces loops over collections (for x in collection) where the collection may grow with dependency count or file count.
• The diff adds os.scandir, os.walk, os.listdir, or subprocess.run calls on a path that executes per-package or per-dependency.
• The diff adds x in list_variable inside a loop body.

Fallback self-check (when no fast-path file matched): "Does this PR change the hot path for dependency download, materialization, cache layout, transport (git protocol, partial clone, sparse checkout), parallelism, or any user-visible install/update wall-time? Does it introduce an algorithmic complexity regression (O(n^2) loops, repeated I/O, missing indexes, unconditional full scans, blocking synchronous calls, heavy top-level imports)? If unsure, answer YES."

When active, the performance-expert reviews against BOTH:

1. The package-manager performance playbook: transport minimization (depth, filter, sparse scope), cache layering and dedup keys, parallelism and lock contention, working-tree materialization cost, perf-harness methodology (cache wipe, warm/cold separation, statistical noise), and pervasive application of the chosen technique across install / update / run surfaces.
2. The algorithmic performance lens (Big O analysis): complexity class of every loop/lookup in the diff, index vs linear scan patterns, unconditional expensive operations, import startup costs, redundant computation, and parallelism opportunities. See the agent's references/algorithmic-patterns.md for the full pattern catalogue.

Test Coverage Expert

Active by default on every PR that touches src/**/*.py. The only condition that flips this persona to active: false is a documentation-only PR -- the diff contains zero src/**/*.py files. In that case set inactive_reason: "documentation-only PR -- no runtime code paths to defend".

The activation rule is intentionally narrow: under the advisory regime, test outcomes are LOAD-BEARING for CEO arbitration (passed / failed / missing test evidence outranks opinion-only findings -- see apm-ceo.agent.md and panelist-return-schema.json evidence block). A persona whose findings carry that weight cannot be silently skipped on a heuristic. Better to spawn it on a pure refactor and have it return a single nit-severity "no behavior surface touched -- no coverage finding" line than to skip it and leave the CEO without evidence to weigh. (Earlier revisions of this skill paired test-coverage with auth and doc-writer as conditional for symmetry; that symmetry broke when test evidence became load-bearing.)

The test-coverage-expert is paired with the devx-ux-expert lens and defends the user-promise contracts the DevX persona enumerates (CLI surface, error wording, install idempotency, lockfile determinism, auth resolution). It MUST verify "no test exists" claims with view/grep on the test tree before emitting a finding -- false-positive coverage findings destroy trust in the field. It does NOT compute coverage percentages, does NOT flag tests for pure refactors, and does NOT duplicate python-architect on test-code design.

Routing matrix (CEO synthesis emphasis only)

These routes describe WHICH specialist's findings the CEO weights more heavily for a given PR type. They do NOT change which personas run -- every mandatory persona always runs. Routing is a CEO synthesis hint.

• Architecture-heavy PR -> CEO weights Python Architect on abstraction calls; CLI Logging on consistency.
• CLI UX PR -> CEO weights DevX UX on command surface; CLI Logging on output paths; Growth Hacker on first-run conversion.
• Security PR -> CEO biases toward Supply Chain Security on default behavior; DevX UX flags ergonomics regression from any mitigation.
• Auth PR (auth-expert active) -> CEO weights Auth Expert on AuthResolver / token precedence; Supply Chain on token-scoping.
• Docs / release / comms PR (doc-writer active) -> CEO weights Doc Writer on accuracy and voice; Growth Hacker on hook and story angle.
• Behavior-change PR (test-coverage active) -> CEO weights Test Coverage Expert on regression-trap presence; DevX UX on which user promises the change touches. A blocking-severity coverage finding on a critical-promise surface (auth, lockfile, install, marketplace, hooks) is the highest signal in this routing.
• Full panel (default) -> CEO synthesizes equally; calls out any dissent in dissent_notes.

Execution checklist

Work through these steps in order. Do not skip ahead. Do not emit any output to the PR before step 6. Every task spawn below is BLOCKING: wait for the subagent to return before continuing, and never end your turn while a panelist or the CEO synthesizer is still running. The turn ends only after the comment (step 7) and label sweep (step 8) -- or, if no comment can be rendered, an explicit noop (step 9) -- are emitted.

1. Read PR context (the orchestrating workflow already fetched it via gh pr view / gh pr diff). Identify changed files for the conditional panelist routing decisions (auth-expert and doc-writer).

2. Resolve the conditional panelists using the rules above. Decide for EACH conditional persona: spawn active OR spawn with active: false + an inactive_reason. Either way, all three conditional personas ARE spawned -- the schema requires uniform return shape.

3. Fan out panelist tasks. Spawn the following tasks in PARALLEL via the task tool, one task per persona:

   • python-architect (also asked to supply extras.diagrams: class_diagram (mermaid classDiagram), component (mermaid flowchart TD), and OPTIONAL sequence (mermaid sequenceDiagram) blocks per the persona's section 1/2/3 contract)
   • cli-logging-expert
   • devx-ux-expert
   • supply-chain-security-expert
   • oss-growth-hacker
   • auth-expert (always - active per step 2)
   • doc-writer (always - active per step 2)
   • test-coverage-expert (always - active per step 2)
   • performance-expert (always - active per step 2)

   Each task prompt MUST:

   • Reference its persona file by relative path so the subagent loads its own scope, lens, and anti-patterns.
   • Include the PR number, title, body, and diff (passed inline).
   • Cite assets/panelist-return-schema.json and require the subagent to emit JSON matching that schema as its FINAL message.
   • State the calibrated severity contract: "Use severity: blocking ONLY for correctness regressions, security/auth bypasses, or architectural faults that compound, with explicit rationale. Default substantive feedback to recommended. Use nit for one-line polish. The panel is advisory; nothing you return blocks merge -- pick the severity that honestly matches your signal strength."
   • Restate the output contract: NO gh write commands, NO posting comments, NO label changes, NO touching PR state. JSON return only.

4. S4 schema gate. When each panelist task returns, parse the JSON and validate against assets/panelist-return-schema.json. On validation failure:

   • Re-spawn that ONE panelist with an explicit error message pointing at the violated rule.
   • Maximum two re-spawn attempts per panelist. If still malformed, synthesize a placeholder {persona: "<slug>", active: true, summary: "Schema failure -- see extras.", findings: [], extras: {schema_failure: "<reason>"}} and surface the failure in the CEO arbitration prompt.

5. Spawn the CEO synthesizer task. Pass the full set of validated panelist JSON returns to a task invocation that loads ../../agents/apm-ceo.agent.md. Run it as a BLOCKING task and WAIT for its JSON return -- do NOT spawn it detached (background mode that returns an agent_id) and do NOT end your turn while it runs. Its return is required to render the comment; ending the turn here is the exact cause of the "No Safe Outputs Generated" failure. The prompt MUST:

   • Provide all panelist returns as structured input.
   • Ask for: headline, arbitration prose, principle alignment (only applicable principles), curated recommended_followups (prioritized by signal, NOT a re-listing of every finding), ship_recommendation (stance + prose).
   • Cite assets/ceo-return-schema.json and require JSON return.
   • Restate the contract: the panel is advisory. The CEO does NOT pick a verdict label. The ship_recommendation.stance is prose for the human reviewer, not a gate. NO gh write commands.

   Validate the CEO return against assets/ceo-return-schema.json. On failure, re-spawn once with the violation cited.

6. Resolve the notification audience. The advisory comment must surface in the inboxes of the people who will act on it. Run:

   gh pr view <PR_NUMBER> --json author,reviewRequests
   

   Build notify_audience as the deduplicated list:

   • the PR author's @login (always included);
   • every requested reviewer's @login (these are the CODEOWNERS-resolved reviewers GitHub auto-requested for the touched paths, plus any explicitly-requested human reviewers);
   • every requested team's @org/team-slug (CODEOWNERS team entries).

   Filter out:

   • bot logins (login ending in [bot] or matching dependabot|github-actions|copilot-pull-request-reviewer);
   • the orchestrator's own identity (avoid self-ping).

   Cap the final list at 6 handles to avoid notification noise (PR author + up to 5 reviewers/teams). If the cap trims, prefer team handles over individual logins. Pass the resulting list to the template renderer as notify_audience.

   This step replaces the maintainer-notification signal that the pre-advisory verdict labels carried. It is the only mechanism by which a fresh panel pass announces itself.

7. Render the comment. Load assets/recommendation-template.md, fill the placeholders from the panelist + CEO JSON, and emit it as exactly ONE comment.

   Filling rules:

   • The per-persona summary table renders ONLY active panelists, one row per persona, with finding counts by severity and the persona's summary field.
   • The mermaid diagrams come from python-architect.extras.diagrams. If absent, render the placeholder lines from the template (do NOT invent diagrams).
   • The recommended follow-ups list renders the CEO's curated subset, not every finding. Full per-persona findings collapse at the bottom.
   • NEVER render the words "Verdict", "APPROVE", "REJECT", "blocked", "merge gate", or any equivalent. The panel is advisory.

8. Sweep labels via safe-outputs.remove-labels. The list MUST be [panel-review, panel-approved, panel-rejected] -- always all three, regardless of which are currently on the PR. panel-review is the re-run idempotency reset; the other two are LEGACY VERDICT LABELS from the pre-advisory regime that have no meaning under the advisory contract and would mislead readers if left on a freshly-reviewed PR. safe-outputs.remove-labels is idempotent on missing labels, so sweeping all three on every run is safe and self-healing. NO verdict labels are applied.

9. Guarantee a non-empty exit. Your final action this turn MUST be a safe output. In the normal path that is the single add-comment from step 7 (the remove-labels sweep alone does NOT count -- it is not the run's required output). Before ending the turn, confirm step 7 actually issued the add-comment call and it did not error. If, after every subagent has returned, you genuinely cannot render a comment (e.g. a fatal upstream error), call noop so the run records an intentional no-action rather than an empty agent_output. Ending the turn with zero safe outputs is a FAILURE, not a success -- see the "Non-empty turn exit" architecture invariant.

Output contract (non-negotiable)

• Exactly ONE comment per panel run, rendered from assets/recommendation-template.md. The safe-outputs.add-comment.max: 2 is a fail-soft ceiling; the discipline lives here.
• Exactly ONE remove-labels call sweeping [panel-review, panel-approved, panel-rejected].
• NO add-labels call. The advisory regime has no verdict to encode.
• Subagents (panelists + CEO) NEVER write to PR state, NEVER call gh pr comment, NEVER call gh pr edit --add-label. They return JSON. The orchestrator is the sole writer.
• Never invent new top-level template sections or drop existing ones.

Gotchas

• Roster invariant. The frontmatter description, the roster table, the conditional rules, the recommendation template, and the JSON schema MUST agree on the persona set. If you change one, change all in the same edit.
• Calibrated severity discipline. The advisory regime relies on panelists honestly distinguishing blocking from recommended. If a panelist marks everything blocking, the comment becomes noisy and the maintainer learns to ignore the field. The panelist prompts state the contract explicitly; the CEO arbitration prose is the safety valve when a panelist over-flags.
• Mermaid diagrams are template-required. The python-architect persona is asked to supply extras.diagrams.class_diagram, extras.diagrams.component, and the OPTIONAL extras.diagrams.sequence. The template renders nothing when they are missing -- it does NOT invent diagrams. Real diagrams are what makes the comment scannable for the human reviewer.
• Mermaid classDiagram :::cssClass shorthand gotcha. GitHub's mermaid renderer rejects :::cssClass appended to relationship lines (e.g. A *-- B:::touched); use standalone class Name:::cssClass declarations instead. Authority: python-architect.agent.md:146-154.
• Doc-writer detects DRIFT, not just edits. When the PR changes user-facing code that SHOULD have updated docs but did not, doc-writer surfaces that as a finding. The conditional rule above is necessary but not sufficient -- doc-writer reasons about doc consistency given the diff, not just whether doc files were touched.
• False-negative auth gotcha. Auth regressions can be introduced from non-auth files that change the inputs to auth -- host classification, dependency parsing, clone URL construction, HTTP authorization headers, or call sites that bypass AuthResolver. If a diff changes how a remote host, org, token source, or fallback path is selected and you are not certain it is auth-neutral, activate auth-expert as active: true.
• Test-coverage probe is mandatory. The test-coverage-expert MUST verify "no test exists for X" via view/grep on the tests/ tree before emitting a finding. A false-positive coverage finding (test exists but persona claimed it does not) destroys maintainer trust in the field. The persona scope file enforces this; the orchestrator passes the diff and trusts the persona to probe.
• Subagent write enforcement is contract-based, not sandbox-based. Tool permissions are workflow-scoped, not subagent-scoped, so every spawned task technically inherits the same gh toolset. The "subagents must not write" rule is enforced by the prompt contract in each .agent.md plus the safe-outputs.add-comment.max: 2 fail-soft. If a subagent ever tries to post a comment, the cap catches it.
• Empty-safe-output failure (background spawn-and-forget). The single most common way this panel "succeeds" yet posts nothing is spawning the CEO synthesizer (or a panelist) as a background/detached task and then ending the turn while it is still running. The harness exits with agent_output = {"items":[]}, gh-aw skips safe-output detection, the add-comment job never runs, and the workflow opens a "No Safe Outputs Generated" issue. Every task spawn MUST be awaited to completion, and the turn MUST end with a safe output -- the comment, or an explicit noop. See the "Synchronous fan-out" and "Non-empty turn exit" architecture invariants and step 9.
• No verdict-label reset workflow. The previous regime had a companion workflow pr-panel-label-reset.yml that stripped verdict labels on every push. The advisory regime has no verdict labels to strip; that workflow is removed.