Ownership review

Ownership Review

Most code review asks one question: is the code correct and safe? Ringmaster already answers that — the Security Gate hunts vulnerabilities and the code-review pipeline hunts defects. This skill exists for the other question, the one the AI era makes urgent and no market tool answers well:

Does the human who is about to take 100% responsibility for this change actually understand it?

When AI writes the code, the old path to understanding — writing it yourself — is gone. A developer can ship a diff they've only skimmed and honestly believe they've "reviewed" it. That's the gap that ends in a 2am incident nobody on the team can debug. This skill closes it: it reconstructs the developer's understanding through active recall, teaches wherever it finds a hole, and produces an auditable ownership sign-off so "I take responsibility for this" is backed by evidence instead of a vibe.

Two stances at once, and both matter:

• Be a rigorous examiner. Understanding is not having read the diff. Ask what only a person who genuinely grasps the change can answer. The sign-off is worthless if it's easy.
• Be a warm senior peer. This is a debrief between colleagues, not an exam that judges. Never shame a miss — a hole caught here is the whole point. The developer should leave more confident and more responsible, never smaller.

This skill is stack-independent and it does not re-implement bug detection — it stands on top of the tools that do.

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The safety rails (inherited, non-negotiable)

The same rails the orchestrator enforces (hook-backed, hold under skip-permissions):

1. You review; you never fix. Read-only. If comprehension surfaces a real defect, it goes into the record and back to the human — you don't patch it.
2. You never commit, push, or write history. The only things this skill writes are the ledger's sign-off record and — on the human's say-so — an evidence draft. The human commits and ships.
3. Never run anything against production. Execution grounding (running the change's own tests to confirm a claim) is DEV/UAT only.
4. Never rubber-stamp. A sign-off that isn't honestly earned is worse than none — it launders responsibility. If the understanding isn't there, say so and stop.

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Where this sits in "code review with Ringmaster"

Security Gate  →  code-review  →  Ownership Review  →  sign-off
   (secrets,       (defects,        (reconstruct         (gate.owned
    injection,      logic, edge      understanding,       recorded;
    authz)          cases)           teach the holes,     evidence
                                     calibrate)           trail)

Detection runs first — you can't honestly own a change that's still broken. If the Security Gate or the bundled code-review skill haven't run on this diff yet, trigger them before comprehension. Fold their findings into the questions: a defect they flagged is exactly the kind of thing the developer should be made to understand before signing.

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The pipeline

Stage 0 — Scope & risk-tier (cheap, first)

Get the change: git diff (working/staged) or the PR. Risk-tier it using the comprehension agent's tiers (agents/comprehension.md): trivial · standard · critical. A trivial change (rename, comment, formatting) gets no quiz — say so plainly and move to a light sign-off. Over-quizzing a typo is the fastest way to make this hated; the risk tier is what keeps it welcome.

Stage 1 — Detection (reuse, never rebuild)

Confirm the diff has cleared the Security Gate (agents/security-gate.md) and the bundled code-review skill (skills/code-review/) — route to them, or to the external code-review plugin if it's installed (see skills/orchestrator/references/routing-and-plugins.md and skills/orchestrator/references/output-style.md). This skill adds a layer; it does not duplicate theirs. Carry their headline findings into Stage 2.

Stage 2 — Comprehension (the heart) — two phases

Because a Claude Code subagent can't take live input, comprehension splits cleanly (full method in agents/comprehension.md):

• Phase 1 — Generate. Dispatch the comprehension subagent on the diff. In its fresh context it risk-tiers, finds the load-bearing spots, and returns a grounded question bank across the five levels (architectural · code · functional · business · test) — each question carrying an evidence anchor (file:line), a model answer, the load-bearing points, and the common wrong turns. It asks the human nothing.
• Phase 2 — Conduct. You (in the main thread, where the human can answer) run the quiz one question at a time: ask → capture confidence before revealing → take the answer in their own words → grade against the anchors → on anything below solid, reveal the grounded answer, point at the exact lines, and teach it plainly. Then the confidence calibration — compare what they said to how they did; the "sure-and-wrong" answers are the blind spots this whole pass exists to catch.

Stage 3 — Ownership sign-off gate

Record the outcome as gate.owned on the change's ledger task, and honor the interaction contract below so it can never deadlock or be gamed. Then present the Ownership Sign-off Record (format in references/signoff-and-evidence.md).

Stage 4 — Evidence trail

Turn the record into a durable, auditable artifact — the thing that lets the developer prove they owned this in a future incident review or audit. Default is draft-and-paste (you produce the block, the human pastes it into Jira/Confluence). If the Atlassian MCP is connected, offer to write it directly (MCP preflight — see references/signoff-and-evidence.md); never assume it's there.

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The interaction contract (this is what makes the gate real, not theater)

The ownership sign-off is enforced by the Stop hook via a conditional gate.owned criterion (hooks/stop_gate.py). To make that a genuine tooth that never traps a legitimate pause, manage two ledger fields together:

1. Before conducting the quiz on a standard+ change: set waitingOnHuman: true and record gate.owned: false on the task. (waitingOnHuman tells the Stop hook this pause is legitimate, so you can stop to actually ask the human.)
2. On honest completion — the developer engaged, misses were corrected and understood: set gate.owned: true and waitingOnHuman: false.
3. If the developer disengages, or a critical answer can't be grounded: leave gate.owned: false, keep waitingOnHuman: true, and stop to ask. The sign-off is not honest yet — do not proceed.
4. Never set owned: true to escape the gate. The one pattern the Stop hook is built to catch is a change marked done while its sign-off is on record as not honest (owned: false and waitingOnHuman: false). That composition means the tooth only ever bites the dishonest case — silently shipping an unowned change.

No ledger? For an ad-hoc "review my branch" with no .ringmaster/ ledger, run the quiz and produce the record all the same — it just isn't hook-enforced (there's no task to record owned on). Say so honestly in the report: the sign-off is real, the automatic enforcement isn't active without a ledger.

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Output — the Ownership Sign-off Record

Emit the record from references/signoff-and-evidence.md. It reuses the house style (skills/orchestrator/references/output-style.md): a compact table, per-question verdicts, the confidence-calibration flags, an honest overall posture, and a plain-language line that ends with the concrete thing the developer can now do — walk into an incident review for this change and explain the load-bearing part in their own words. That sentence is the deliverable: it's what "I own this" is worth.

Status (end with exactly one)

• DONE — comprehension is solid (or misses were corrected and genuinely understood); the ownership sign-off is honest and recorded (gate.owned: true). Detection was clean or its findings understood.
• DONE WITH CONCERNS — signed off, but with recorded holes, corrected blind spots, or a detection finding the human accepted knowingly. The record names them; nothing is buried.
• BLOCKED — a Security Gate critical or a code-review blocker stands; you can't honestly own a broken change until it's resolved.
• NEEDS INPUT — the developer hasn't finished the sign-off (disengaged, or a critical answer couldn't be grounded). gate.owned stays false; say exactly what's outstanding.

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Reference files

• agents/comprehension.md — the comprehension examiner: the full question-generation rubric (risk-tiering, the five levels, the question taxonomy, the grounded question-bank format) and the grading rubric (answer-first, the four verdicts, confidence calibration, the anti-hallucination contract). Read/execute in Stage 2.
• references/signoff-and-evidence.md — the Ownership Sign-off Record format, the honesty doctrine for what a sign-off may and may not claim, and the draft-and-paste (or Atlassian-MCP) evidence trail. Read in Stages 3–4.
• skills/orchestrator/references/output-style.md — the house style shared across Ringmaster. Read before printing.