For context: in the previous piece, I worked through a five-dimension review framework for documentation, covering clarity, readability, style, completeness, and technical accuracy. Those dimensions are now part of how our team's AI agent reviews PRs. It runs them on every review pass, quietly, in the background. Most people don't think about them. They just see the review output.
Then I started catching things on my own review pass that the agent had marked clean. The style scan reported zero hits. I'd find three present-tense violations on the next read. A completeness check came back marked complete. A ticket requirement was unaddressed in the diff. The dimensions were running. They were also missing things, and I was the one finding what they missed.
This piece is about what I learned from that gap, what I built to close it, and the bigger principle I'm still working through. Sharing as I go, in case any of it is useful.
The setup
I'd built up a set of gates around the dimension checks. A PRE-FLIGHT gate that forced the agent to write a todo list with concrete execution methods for each dimension before any review work began. No "I'll check style" wishful thinking; you had to say "I'll run gh pr diff and scan for forbidden terms, will/would violations, and passive voice constructions." A COMPLETION gate that required documented evidence for all five dimensions before the review file could be written: findings, or "no issues, here's what I checked."
