What problem does it solve? Code reviews often vary in rigor depending on the reviewer or tool, letting regressions in compatibility, performance, security, or testing slip through silently. This Skill defines a fixed set of hard gates that every PR review must check, so no critical dimension is skipped without an explicit justification. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Eleven mandatory review gates: backward compatibility, migration via expand-contract, performance, reuse, testing, security, why/ROI, user experience, determinism, over/underengineering balance, and compatibility matrix coverage. - Tool-agnostic application: applies whether the review runs through pr-reviewer, giving-code-review, requesting-code-review, scout-pr-review, or an ad-hoc manual review. - Layering with repo policy: acts as a meta layer above repo-specific policies like .scout/review-policy.md, which can add detail but never override a non-negotiable. - Use Case: While reviewing a PR that removes a legacy API endpoint, the reviewer flags it as a finding because there is no expand phase and no verified-zero-usage check before the old path is removed. ## Quick Start Review this pull request against the PR review non-negotiables checklist and report any gate that fails or is not applicable.
