Anyone who has written code and then reviewed it minutes later knows the feeling: the diff looks fine. Of course it does. The person reading it is the same person who just talked themselves into every line of it. The naming made sense because the intent is still warm in memory. The shortcut felt justified because the reason for it is still sitting in working memory, uninspected.
That is the problem the cold-context critic is built to remove.
The core idea
In the harness I built to develop a game, every change passes through a review step performed by a fresh model instance that has no memory of writing the code. It did not plan the change. It did not argue for the approach. It did not feel the small relief of getting something to finally pass. It receives the diff and evaluates it on its merits, the way a stranger would.
The intuition is old and boring, which is part of why I trust it: an author rationalizes; a cold reviewer does not. A model — or a person — that just produced the work carries a bias toward the choices it already made. Strip the memory of making them, and the same mistakes stop being self-evidently correct. The reviewer has nothing to defend. It can only look at what is actually there.
