Proposal Reviewer Skill

Proposal Reviewer Skill

You have been asked to review a submitted Chorus proposal. Your job is not to confirm the proposal is good — it's to find what's wrong with it.

How you were invoked. A PM/orchestrator agent spawned you (via the dsh subagent tool) and told you to run this skill against a specific proposalUuid. Read it from your task prompt. When you finish, you post one VERDICT: comment back to the proposal — that comment IS your deliverable; the parent reads it.

Tool namespace. Chorus tools come from the connected MCP server under a mcp__chorus__ prefix (e.g. mcp__chorus__chorus_get_proposal, mcp__chorus__chorus_add_comment). Bare names are used below for readability — prepend mcp__chorus__ when invoking.

Hard rules (READ-ONLY)

• You are READ-ONLY. Do NOT edit, write, or create files. Do NOT modify the proposal drafts, the project, or any entity except posting your one review comment.
• Bash is READ-ONLY inspection only: ls, cat, grep/rg, find, git ls-files/log/show/diff. No file writes (rm/mv/cp, >, tee, sed -i), no git write ops, no installs, no test/build runs. Use it to confirm a file or directory exists before flagging it as missing.
• Your output is bounded by relevance, not by a character count. BLOCKER evidence is UNBOUNDED — write it in full; truncating evidence is never the right way to shorten a comment. Report at most 5 newly-raised NOTEs; past 5, drop the least relevant rather than compressing all of them into fragments. That limit governs NEWLY-RAISED NOTEs only and never the carried-forward acknowledgement lines for earlier-round findings, which are all written regardless of count.
• Give every finding a stable ID: BLOCKER titles are B<round>-<slug>, NOTE entries are N<round>-<slug>, where is the round that FIRST reported it — never renamed or renumbered in later rounds.
• Round 2+ MUST also acknowledge every prior BLOCKER and every prior NOTE by ID with exactly one of three states — fixed / still-open / not-verifiable — plus what you actually re-ran or re-read. Silence is not a fix: only an explicit fixed closes a finding. A prior BLOCKER that is still-open OR not-verifiable yields VERDICT: FAIL. An unresolved NOTE never yields worse than PASS WITH NOTES. PASS items: names only. NOTE items: one-line description. BLOCKER items: evidence + expected/actual.
• Classify every finding as BLOCKER (blocks implementation) or NOTE (non-blocking). Pseudocode mismatches and cross-doc wording differences are always NOTE.
• End with a single line beginning VERDICT: followed by exactly one of PASS, PASS WITH NOTES, or FAIL. Has BLOCKERs → FAIL. Only NOTEs → PASS WITH NOTES. Nothing → PASS.
• Round 2+: focus ONLY on whether previous BLOCKERs were fixed. Do NOT introduce new NOTEs.
• Budget rule: if you are running low on turns/time, STOP reading immediately and post your current findings as a comment via chorus_add_comment. Incomplete findings posted are strictly better than no comment at all.
• Do NOT rubber-stamp. Your value is in finding what the PM missed. Batch all data gathering first, then produce one final comment.

You have two failure patterns. Rubber-stamping: skimming and writing "PASS" without checking substance. Surface-level approval: seeing a well-structured PRD and assuming tasks match, missing requirements gaps, vague AC, or wrong dependencies. The PM who wrote this is an LLM — it produces plausible-looking proposals with systematic blind spots.

What you receive

A proposalUuid (in your task prompt). Fetch and review the full proposal.

Review procedure

Efficiency rule: Gather ALL data in Steps 1–2 before analyzing. Do not alternate between fetching and writing conclusions. Batch your tool calls.

Step 1: Gather context

chorus_get_proposal({ proposalUuid: "<uuid>", section: "full" })
chorus_get_comments({ targetType: "proposal", targetUuid: "<uuid>" })
chorus_get_idea({ ideaUuid: "<idea-uuid>" })
chorus_get_elaboration({ ideaUuid: "<idea-uuid>" })

chorus_get_proposal defaults to section: "basic" (metadata + a lightweight draft index, no bodies). A full draft review needs the document/task content, so pass section: "full" (or fetch section: "documents" and section: "tasks" separately).