feat(cursor-review): make panel integrity a check-run conclusion

[mattmillerai]

ELI-5

When the review panel runs, six AI reviewers each look at your PR and one judge writes up what they found. If one of those six gets stuck and never answers, its check still turned green — so anything reading the PR's check rollup saw a complete panel when it was really a third of a panel. This PR makes that visible: a reviewer that didn't answer turns its own check red, and one new Panel integrity check says whether the panel as a whole was whole. The review still posts either way — nothing new blocks a merge unless a repo chooses to require the new check.

What changed

1. A leg that didn't submit is red. The review job gets a final step, Fail the leg when the cell did not submit, which reads /tmp/findings-out/findings.json back and exits 1 when its status is not ok. It sits after Upload findings artifact on purpose: the artifact is already published, consolidate and notify-complete gate on needs.review.result != 'skipped' (a failed matrix is not a skipped one) and post-review gates on consolidate, so the consolidated review still posts. The only thing that changes is that the gap reaches the rollup. The Run cursor review comment block is updated to say the step cap avoids a cancelled run, and that the leg is now deliberately failed when the cell did not submit.

2. A panel-level Panel integrity context. consolidate now exposes ok_count, total (from the aggregate step), degraded and judge_status as job outputs. A new panel-integrity job — needs: [gate, round-cap, diff-size, preflight, ledger, review, consolidate, post-review] (preflight and ledger joined in the second and third review rounds, round-cap when #345's max_rounds cap landed on main — see Judgment calls), always() plus the same four gate conditions consolidate uses (nested under an upstream-failure disjunct, so a failed decision job is red rather than skipped), permissions: {}, timeout-minutes: 5 — emits one ::error:: per cause and exits 1 when any of: fewer cells submitted than ran; ungated_findings is non-empty and greater than zero; delivered != 'true'; degraded == 'true'. A false incremental_subset is annotated as a ::warning:: and is deliberately not a cause — see Judgment calls. Otherwise it prints one ::notice::Panel integrity: <ok>/<total> cells, <n> anchored finding(s), 0 unanchored. and exits 0. It gates no other job — a short panel must not also cost the PR the findings it did produce.

3. Caller-facing docs. A ## Panel integrity section in the setup guide next to the Blocking gate (what red means, that it is the context an automated merge gate should read, and the two-switch required-check shape), plus a job/check-run table and a matching section in the directory README. Both surfaces scope the claim to "was the panel whole?" and state plainly that the deliberate no-panel branches stay skipped, that a required skipped check passes, and that over-cap in particular wants the Blocking gate. The root README.md catalog row is updated too (0ca9800): it enumerated the check surface as Blocking-gate-only, so after this branch it was wrong by omission on the two things an adopter most needs — that there is now a second, always-on Panel integrity context and that it, not a panel leg, is the stable one to require; and that the caller job goes red on ~40% of runs. The skip semantics are stated in the same breath; forgeability and same-SHA supersession are pointed at rather than restated, so the catalog cannot drift from the guide on the details.

No caller change is required; the shared caller bumper propagates the workflow SHA. No Skip-caller-bump trailer — this is a behavioral change and every fleet caller should bump.

Judgment calls

• The leg check reads the artifact defensively rather than as a one-liner. That cell's own agent runs --trust with shell access in the same job, so findings.json is untrusted bytes and its status lands in a ::workflow command:: line. A missing or unparseable file now reads as "did not submit" and produces the proper ::error:: instead of a traceback, and the value is sanitized by replacing disallowed characters rather than dropping them — deleting them would let a crafted "o k" collapse into the one value that passes. Panel integrity flattens every value it interpolates for the same reason (a newline forges a second workflow command) and, since bec0638, percent-escapes them too — the runner unescapes %0A back into a newline, so stripping real newlines alone left JUDGE_STATUS (an unvalidated string from the judge agent's own tool) able to forge a command without containing one. Both are covered by tests.

• always(), not !cancelled(), on panel-integrity. GitHub counts a skipped required check as passing, so green-on-cancel would be a fail-open for any repo that requires this — the same reasoning the Blocking gate documents at its own if:. A cancelled run therefore reports red; under the documented cancel-in-progress caller that red lands on the superseded head SHA, not the new one. Documented.

• The caller job now goes red on a failing leg, on a measured ~40% of runs. A reusable's caller job takes the aggregate conclusion of the jobs inside it, so this is unavoidable given (1) — and it is the point, since the rollup is the surface the whole ticket is about. Called out explicitly in the setup guide, with the instruction to require Panel integrity rather than the caller job.

• A failed Gate, Diff size check or Preflight fails Panel integrity, it does not skip it. Originally this skipped, on the reasoning that the Gate context is itself red so the rollup still carries the signal. That was a fail-open, caught in review: all four gate conditions read job outputs, an output is empty when the job producing it failed, so the check skipped on exactly those runs — and GitHub counts a skipped required check as passing, which would have handed a green merge gate to any caller that took this PR's own advice and required it. The job if: now also runs on needs.gate.result != 'success' and on a fresh in-scope review whose diff-size did not succeed, and a first step Fail if the panel decision itself did not complete turns that into red — the same fail-closed shape as Blocking gate's first two guards. Guard first, so the report step never evaluates its causes off empty outputs. A second review round found that fix had closed only two of the three decision jobs: review declares needs: preflight, so a failed preflight skips the whole matrix and leaves needs.review.result == 'skipped' — indistinguishable from the deliberate no-panel branches — and the check skipped over a run where not one cell started. preflight now joins needs: and the same guard covers it. A third round found the same fail-open one dependency further over: the matrix declares needs: [gate, diff-size, preflight, ledger], and ledger was the one job of the four still unguarded — a red ledger skips the matrix, review reports skipped, and the check skipped into a green required check. ledger now joins needs:, the job if: and the guard as well. It reads like it cannot fail (every step in it is continue-on-error, precisely so it never skips the matrix) but that makes it rare, not unreachable: Ensure ledger artifact exists carries no continue-on-error, its 20-minute job cap sits above only 15 minutes of step caps, and a cancellation or lost runner is not a step outcome at all. The pin is now the RELATIONSHIP — a test reads review's needs: and requires every entry to appear in all three places — because this hole was re-opened twice by a job being added to the matrix and not to the check. The deliberate skips are untouched: they are the branches where gate and diff-size both succeeded and said no panel was warranted. Over-cap stays a skip on purpose and is routed to the Blocking gate, whose own second guard I verified fails closed on exactly that path. round-cap (feat(cursor-review): approve_gate output and per-PR max_rounds cap #345, merged from main) is the one decision job the matrix does not need directly — it sits upstream of diff-size, whose own if: skips on capped == 'true' — so it is read on both sides: a non-success round-cap joins the guard and goes red, and a successful capped head is a deliberate skip like over-cap (the Blocking gate already fails closed on it). Before that, a capped head went red telling the caller to re-run a job that would just hit the cap again; the tests now evaluate the job and guard if: expressions over the capped / uncapped / max_rounds-off / failed-cap / unlabelled / over-cap cases rather than substring-matching them.

• Every cause is paired with its producing job's result, not just its outputs. An output is the empty string when the job producing it failed, and every cause treated empty as a pass. Executing the pre-fix run: block with delivered=true (which post-review.py writes the moment the POST returns, before the rest of that job runs) and a failed post-review exits 0 and prints Panel integrity: 6/6 cells — a green panel signal over a red delivery job. ok_count/total are sharper still: both empty on a dead consolidate, and unset-vs-unset compares equal. The step now reads needs.consolidate.result and needs.post-review.result (the env names blocking-gate and notify-complete already use) and rejects an empty count explicitly instead of comparing it.

• The leg check is scoped as an availability signal, not an attestation. The "did this cell submit" verdict is the status the cell's own --trust agent wrote, so a prompt-injected cell can green itself and the panel count with it. That limit is now stated in the workflow comment, the caller guide and the README, along with what would fix it (recording the submission outside the cell's own writable job). It catches the stalls, crashes and step caps that are what every observed failure has been; it is not proof against an adversarial PR, and the docs no longer read as though it were.

• A discarded incremental block warns; it is deliberately not a cause. This started as a failing cause, written while diff-size declared no such output. Merging fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 (84db66a) both published the output and inverted what a false means, without touching a line of this job. fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 made the subset check fail closed: a block that does not verify is discarded whole and the panel reviews the full reviewed diff alone. So the cells were never "prioritized onto hunks that were not in scope" as the ::error:: claimed — they got no prioritization hint at all, which is byte-identical input to a run that never built a block (round 1, and every "could not build one" branch), and those report true. Reddening the one context callers are told to mark required, over a run whose reviewed content is indistinguishable from a normal one and where nothing was skipped and no finding suppressed, is a merge-blocking false positive — and it is the one cause that never indicated a short panel, which is the only question this check answers. It now emits a ::warning:: naming what actually happened and pointing at the Incremental diff discarded warning on Diff size check for the counts. A non-subset block is still a real builder defect worth seeing; it is not a panel-integrity failure. The other five causes are untouched.

• A new sibling test file rather than edits to test_workflow_job_isolation.py. That suite pins the credential split; this one pins the integrity signals. Same house style: stdlib only, no PyYAML, comments stripped before every assertion so a comment naming a step can never satisfy it.

Capability check

The diff adds exit 1 / ::error:: paths, which is the shape that usually means a capability is being denied — it is not one here, and I verified that rather than asserting it. Nothing the workflow could do before is refused: the new check is advisory, gates no job, and the consolidated review still posts over a short panel. I confirmed that by reading every downstream if: — consolidate and notify-complete key on needs.review.result != 'skipped', post-review on needs.consolidate.result == 'success', blocking-gate does not needs: the panel at all — and a repo-wide grep for needs.review returns only those three sites, so no path keys on the panel having succeeded. A test asserts no job needs: panel-integrity.

Provenance

• Authored by: agent-work loop

• Verified: at head 432fa41 (merge of origin/main cfca794, fix(bump-callers): move cursor-approve and axis pins with cursor-review, and bump on their changes (BE-19438) #355–fix(cursor-approve): withdraw the bot's standing request for changes once auto-approve stops deciding #363 — no textual conflict; those touch auto-approve/approve-external, post-review's needs: and diff-size's new incremental_state output, none of which Panel integrity reads; incremental_subset, which it does read, is still emitted unchanged):

  • cursor-review (1119 tests), cursor-approve (161) and workflow-pins (551, 43 skipped) unittest suites pass on that tree, including test_workflow_panel_integrity.py.
  • check_workflow_pins.py OK (167 uses: refs SHA-pinned); check_agents_md.py --root . passes with 2 pre-existing warnings; check-org-repo-literals.sh OK.
  • Job graph pinned by tests: panel-integrity's needs: is a superset of review's decision jobs plus round-cap, every output it reads is declared upstream, nothing needs: it, permissions: {} intact; the if: truth-table tests cover capped / uncapped / failed-cap / over-cap cases.
  • PR CI on the previous head 55ede56: all 8 checks pass; CI on 432fa41 pending at time of writing; no merge_group run exists for this PR.
  • Not done: no live panel run (see Residual).

• Deviations:

  • Three fail-opens fixed in review: failed decision jobs (gate, diff-size, preflight, ledger) now fail the check rather than skip it, pinned as a relationship to review's needs:; causes are paired with producing-job results, not outputs alone.
  • % → %25 escape added to flatten() so agent-written JUDGE_STATUS cannot inject workflow commands (bec0638).
  • incremental_subset == 'false' demoted from a failing cause to a ::warning:: after fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 made a discarded block mean "panel read the full diff" (76aa262) — a deviation from the plan, whose premise no longer holds.
  • Docs: setup guide, directory README and root README.md catalog row updated (3d0b477, 0ca9800), including the same-head-SHA supersession caveat.
  • Semantic conflict with feat(cursor-review): approve_gate output and per-PR max_rounds cap #345 fixed (8c786ef): round-cap added as a decision job, and a max_rounds-capped head now skips the check instead of going red.
  • Answered but not actioned, threads left open on purpose for the merger: staging the per-leg exit 1, and same-head-SHA supersession (design change, filed as a follow-up).
  Deviation detail (carried forward)

  none against the plan as specified. Three corrections after review, all fail-opens the plan did not anticipate: (1) "a failed Gate skips this check" became fail-closed, extended in the second round to preflight, the third decision job — the matrix needs: it, so its failure was reaching the check as an ordinary skipped review; (2) causes read job outputs only, so a producer that died left a clean-looking report; (3) the round-2 fix named preflight specifically rather than the invariant behind it, leaving ledger — the fourth job the matrix needs: — still able to skip the check into a green required check. That one is now pinned as a relationship between review's needs: and this job's, so the class is closed rather than the third instance of it. The docs asserting the superseded behaviour were corrected in the same commits. A fourth correction landed in bec0638, and it is a reporting-integrity hole rather than a fail-open in the gate: flatten() stripped real newlines before interpolating untrusted values into ::error:: lines, but the runner unescapes %0A in a command's message, so a judge writing its status as error%0A::stop-commands::tok reaches the annotation with no newline in it and the runner supplies one. JUDGE_STATUS is the one reachable value (unvalidated agent text; the counts are python-formatted integers and the rest are job results). It cannot forge the check's conclusion, which is driven by the causes counter and the exit code — and it is strictly narrower than the forgeability limit already documented — but it was the one annotating surface in this repo not applying the % -> %25 escape that check_agents_md.py, check_workflow_pins.py, check_public_repo_hygiene.py, check_coderabbit_config.py and check-org-repo-literals.sh all do. Two findings are answered but not actioned, and both threads are left open on purpose: staging the per-leg exit 1 behind an input, and a fourth fail-open found during the reviews pass — a no-panel run on the same head SHA supersedes a red Panel integrity with a skip. The second is a design change, not a patch, and is filed as a follow-up; its documentation half did land, in 3d0b477, because the setup guide was not merely silent on that hole — its "Re-run failed jobs" paragraph actively recommended the whole-workflow re-run that triggers it. See Residual. A fifth correction landed in 0ca9800, docs-only and on a surface the earlier rounds did not touch: the PR updated the setup guide and the .github/cursor-review/ directory README, but not the root README.md public catalog, whose cursor-review.yml row still described the check surface as it was before this branch. AGENTS.md carries a standing warning that this catalog has drifted once already. No Skip-caller-bump: true trailer on it — the trailer declares the whole PR bump-irrelevant for every fleet and this PR is behavioral, and it would be moot anyway, since the cursor-review fleet watches .github/workflows/cursor-review.yml, .github/cursor-review/** and scripts/check-pr-size, not the root README. A sixth correction landed in 76aa262, and it is the first that is behavioral rather than docs-only: Panel integrity failed on incremental_subset == 'false' with an ::error:: asserting the cells had been prioritized onto out-of-scope hunks. Merging fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 made that assertion false — the block is discarded whole and the panel reads the full reviewed diff — so the check was reddening a required-eligible context over a run indistinguishable from a normal one, while the setup guide and the env comment still described the cause as inert. The cause is now a non-failing ::warning:: with a true message, and the relationship is pinned by test, because publishing an output flipped this job's meaning without editing it and nothing else would catch the next such flip. This is a deviation from the plan as specified, which listed incremental_subset as a failing cause; the premise it rested on no longer holds. A seventh correction is to this description rather than to the tree: What changed §2 still enumerated the new job as needs: [gate, diff-size, review, consolidate, post-review], the five-job list from the first round. The second and third review rounds added preflight and ledger — the fail-open fixes that are the substance of the Judgment calls entry on decision jobs — so the summary contradicted both the merged file and its own rationale, on precisely the list that whole saga is about. Corrected to the seven the file declares; no code changed.

Residual

Not fixed here, and worth its own follow-up:

• A no-panel run on the same head SHA supersedes a red verdict with a skip. Found while self-reviewing, after the three rounds above; thread left open at #discussion_r4050781260. The three corrections above closed the decision-job half of the fail-open — a job dying and skipping the check. This is the other half and needs no failure at all: once run A on SHA X reports red, any later event on X where the gate says no panel (an unrelated label toggled, skip-cursor-review applied, the trigger label removed, or the whole-workflow re-run this PR's own setup guide recommends, which sets already_reviewed=true) makes this job's if: false at its second disjunct. The job is skipped, a skipped job still publishes a Panel integrity check run newer than run A's, branch protection reads the latest of a given name, and a skipped required check passes. The panel is still short and the gate is green. Not patched here, deliberately: the verdict lives only in consolidate/post-review job outputs, which do not exist on a run where the panel did not run, so making it event-independent means reading prior state from outside the run (checks: read on the previous conclusion, or pull-requests: read on the landed review) — and this job is pinned by test at permissions: {} with "no API call, no checkout, no network" as a stated property. blocking-gate is the model and shows why it is a design decision rather than a patch: its job if: is unconditional precisely so its verdict is event-independent, and its exemptions for those same two branches are safe only because they fall through to a live thread query. Until it lands, the guide's "require Panel integrity" advice is a weaker gate than that section reads — worth weighing at merge, though a red that a label toggle can clear is still strictly more signal than today's silent green. The docs half is now landed (3d0b477): supersession is a named shape in the setup guide's "before you require it" list (trigger set, and "push a new commit" as the way to clear a red instead of re-triggering on the reviewed one), a matching limit sits beside the forgeability one in the README, both name BE-15604 so the caveat expires with the fix, and the "Re-run failed jobs" paragraph now points at that shape rather than silently recommending into it. The check's behaviour is unchanged; what changed is that the page no longer advises the action that hides the signal it tells you to require.

• No live panel run exercised this. The plan's third verification step — trigger the review label on a test PR, confirm Panel integrity green with all six legs submitting, then force a leg failure (e.g. timeout-minutes: 1 on a branch of the reusable pinned via workflows_ref) and confirm that leg's context and Panel integrity go red while the consolidated review still posts — was not run. It needs a live CURSOR_API_KEY panel on a consumer repo, which this change cannot reach; and this repo's own ci-cursor-review.yml pins a merged-main SHA rather than the branch, so the panel that reviews this PR runs the old code. Everything asserted above is therefore static (workflow-shape tests) plus direct execution of the two run: blocks against fabricated inputs — it is not evidence from a real run. The first live panel after the caller bump is the real acceptance test; watch for Panel integrity red-on-cancel noise and for the ~40% caller-job-red rate landing as expected.

• incremental_subset is unverified because it does not exist yet. Resolved. The sibling ticket landed as fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 and the output exists; the name and the literal false value were both confirmed against diff-size. The branch is no longer dead code — but confirming it also showed the cause was asserting a consequence fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 had made impossible, so it was demoted from a failure to a ::warning:: (Judgment calls). What remains unverified is the same thing as every other cause here: no live panel run has exercised it.

• notify-complete still does not mention a short panel. The Slack complete DM reports judge degradation but not the cell count, so the person who triggered the review is told the review is done without being told a third of the panel never answered. Out of scope here (the ticket scoped this to check-run conclusions), but it is the same gap in the other notification channel.

• The measurements quoted in the code comments and docs are the investigation's, not re-measured here. The 92-run / 38-run / 52-of-552-cell figures come from the spike this change implements; I did not re-run that sweep, and I have no access to the run history to do so. They are quoted in an anonymized form (no repo named) because this repo is public. If the underlying timeout rate has moved since, the "~40% of runs" figure in the setup guide is what would need updating.

• No caller-side audit was possible for the ~40% caller-job-red rate. Review raised that the per-leg exit 1 turns every consumer's caller job red on a measured ~40% of runs the moment this SHA is bumped, with no input to stage it. The setup guide's answer is to require Panel integrity and not the caller job, but whether any consumer currently marks the caller job a required check cannot be checked from here — rosters are repo secrets. That one-time audit belongs before the fleet bump, not in this diff, and the thread is left unresolved so it is visible at merge time.

• The panel count is forgeable by the panel. A cell's status is written by its own --trust agent, so a prompt-injected cell can green its leg and the count. Now documented as a limit in all three surfaces rather than fixed: making it forgery-resistant needs the submission recorded outside the cell's own writable job, which is a change to the submission path, not to this check.

• Aggregate panel findings has the same json.JSONDecodeError gap. consolidate's artifact read (cursor-review.yml ~line 1985) catches JSONDecodeError but not UnicodeDecodeError, on files agents write. Pre-existing and untouched here; it fails closed (the step dies, consolidate goes red, and Panel integrity is now red on that via the new CONSOLIDATE_RESULT cause), so it is visible rather than silent.

• Nothing here reduces the leg-failure rate. The change makes a stalled cursor-agent visible; it does not make it rarer. Explicitly out of scope per the plan, but the ~40% caller-job-red rate is a strong argument for tackling the timeout rate next, and it is the thing most likely to make reviewers start ignoring the red.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The workflow now marks invalid reviewer legs as failed after artifact upload, exposes panel status from consolidation, and adds an advisory Panel integrity job. Structural tests and documentation cover the workflow contract and reported outcomes.

Changes

Panel integrity workflow

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Workflow behavior .github/workflows/cursor-review.yml	Reviewer legs fail when structured findings are missing or invalid while preserving artifacts. consolidate publishes panel counts and judge status. panel-integrity reports incomplete panels, undelivered or unanchored findings, degraded adjudication, and invalid diff subsets.
Structural regression validation .github/cursor-review/tests/test_workflow_panel_integrity.py	Stdlib-only tests verify workflow parsing, step ordering, failure behavior, consolidation outputs, panel-integrity conditions, cancellation handling, annotations, fail-closed behavior, and non-gating behavior.
Operational documentation .github/cursor-review/README.md, docs/callers/cursor-review.md, README.md	Documentation describes the new check, failed cell legs, panel outcomes, caller-job behavior, and required-check guidance.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant ReviewerCell
  participant ArtifactStorage
  participant Consolidate
  participant PanelIntegrity
  ReviewerCell->>ArtifactStorage: Upload findings artifact
  ReviewerCell->>ReviewerCell: Fail leg when submission is invalid
  Consolidate->>ArtifactStorage: Read panel artifacts
  Consolidate->>PanelIntegrity: Provide counts and judge status
  PanelIntegrity->>PanelIntegrity: Evaluate integrity conditions

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Inline comments:
In @.github/cursor-review/README.md:
- Around line 59-61: Revise the Panel integrity documentation and caller
guidance to state that it reports only when a panel is selected and may be
skipped for no-panel states. Remove any recommendation to use it as the sole
required merge check unless those states produce a failing required context, and
make clear that no panel must not be treated as a green signal.

In @.github/cursor-review/tests/test_workflow_panel_integrity.py:
- Around line 258-267: Update test_it_needs_every_job_it_reads to parse the raw
needs scalar into individual trimmed job names before asserting membership.
Compare each required job against this parsed collection, preserving the
existing missing-entry assertions and message.

In @.github/workflows/cursor-review.yml:
- Line 2680: Update the panel-integrity job condition to run when gate fails or
when a selected fresh review has a failed or skipped diff-size job, while
preserving intentional skips for non-triggered, fork, and already-reviewed runs.
Add a first step that detects those upstream failures, logs their gate and
diff-size results, and exits nonzero; retain the existing panel decision checks
for successful upstream jobs.

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[github-actions]

🔍 Cursor Review — Consolidated panel

Triggered by @mattmillerai.

Found 10 finding(s).

Severity	Count
🟠 High	1
🟡 Medium	6
🟢 Low	3

Panel: 5/6 reviewers contributed findings.

Reviewers that did not contribute: gpt-5.6-sol-max:edge-case (error)

[github-actions]

🟡 Medium — This exit 1 flips the shared review matrix job — and therefore every consumer's caller job — red on the self-reported ~40% of runs, with no input to stage or disable it. Any consumer that already marks the caller job a required check (nothing previously told them not to) has its merges blocked fleet-wide the moment this SHA is bumped in. An opt-in input, or an initial ::warning::-only period, would keep a reporting improvement from landing as a merge outage.

Raised by 1 of 6 reviewers (claude-opus-5-thinking-max adversarial).

[mattmillerai]

Not changing this, but flagging it for whoever presses merge rather than closing it, because the risk you name is real and the decision is theirs.

The reasoning for landing it un-staged is in the PR description's Judgment calls: a reusable's caller job takes the aggregate conclusion of the jobs inside it, so a red leg reddening the caller job is unavoidable given the per-cell half — and it is the point, since statusCheckRollup is the surface the whole ticket is about. An input that defaults to off would ship a fix nobody turns on; one that defaults to on is this change with extra surface.

The mitigation is documented rather than inferred: the setup guide says, in the same section that quotes the ~40% figure, to require Panel integrity and not the caller job, "which is red for every unrelated infrastructure failure too". Panel integrity exists precisely so there is a stable context to require instead.

What I cannot check from here, and what I think should happen before this is bumped into the fleet: whether any consumer currently marks the cursor-review caller job a required check. Caller rosters are repo secrets, so I have no way to audit that, and if any repo does, its merges go red on the bump with no caller edit to warn them. That is a one-time pre-bump audit, not a code change — and it is the concrete form of your "merge outage" concern.

I am leaving this thread unresolved on purpose so it is visible at merge time. Separately, the PR's Residual already carries the follow-up this points at: nothing here reduces the leg-failure rate, and the ~40% is a strong argument for tackling the cursor-agent timeout rate next — that is the change that makes the red rare rather than hiding it.

[mattmillerai]

Still not changing the code here, and still leaving this thread unresolved on purpose — the decision is the merger's, and an open thread is what makes it visible at merge time.

One update: the part of this I said I could not do from here — auditing whether any consumer already marks the cursor-review caller job a required check — is now written up as a durable follow-up proposal rather than living only in this thread, since "visible at merge time" depends on whoever merges reading it. It is filed as needing a human rather than an autonomous coder, because the roster lives in a repo secret and the required-check lists have to be read per consumer repo. The proposed shape: read the roster, list each repo's required status checks, flag any that name the caller job rather than a context from inside the reusable, and switch those to <caller job id> / Panel integrity before the SHA bump lands.

Unchanged from my previous reply: the mitigation for everyone else is documented in the setup guide, and Panel integrity exists precisely so there is a stable context to require instead of the caller job.

[mattmillerai]

Still not changing the code, and this thread still stays unresolved on purpose — the staging decision is the merger's.

One thing did change in your favour, though, and it is the specific clause of your finding I could act on: "nothing previously told them not to". That was true of the public catalog until now. The PR updated the setup guide and the .github/cursor-review/ directory README, but the root README.md row — the page a consumer actually meets this workflow on, and the one they read when deciding whether to bump — still enumerated the check surface as advisory-plus-opt-in-blocking. So the warning existed only for someone who had already clicked through to the setup guide.

Landed in 0ca9800, docs-only:

• the row now says there is a second, always-on Panel integrity context, and that <caller job id> / Panel integrity — not the caller job, and not a panel leg, whose name carries the model id — is the stable thing to mark required;
• it states the ~40% caller-job-red rate in the catalog itself, framed as the signal rather than as a failure, with the consolidated review still posting and the Blocking gate unaffected;
• it states the skip semantics in the same breath, since "skipped counts as passing" is what makes a half-read of this unsafe.

That does not retract your concern: a repo that already requires the caller job still goes red on the bump without reading anything, which is exactly why the pre-bump audit is filed as BE-15603 rather than answered here. Documentation reaches the people who look; the audit is what covers the people who don't.

Unchanged: Panel integrity exists precisely so there is a stable context to require instead of the caller job, and the residual argument stands — nothing here reduces the leg-failure rate, and the ~40% is the case for tackling the cursor-agent timeout rate next.

[mattmillerai]

Fail-open, one branch over from the three this PR closed: a later run on the SAME head SHA supersedes a red Panel integrity with a skip.

The three rounds above closed the decision-job half — gate / diff-size / preflight / ledger failing and skipping the check. This is the other half, and it needs no failure at all:

1. Run A on SHA X: 4 of 6 cells submit, the review posts, Panel integrity = red on X.
2. Any later event on the same SHA where the gate says "no panel": an unrelated label toggled, skip-cursor-review applied, the trigger label removed (should_run=false) — or the remediation this PR's own setup guide recommends, "re-running the whole workflow (which re-runs Gate, whose dup-check sees the review that already landed)", which sets already_reviewed=true.
3. Both of those make this if: false at the second disjunct, so the job is skipped — and a skipped job still publishes a check run named Panel integrity, newer than run A's. The latest check run of a given name is the one branch protection reads, and GitHub counts a skipped required check as passing.

Net: the panel is still 4/6, nothing was re-reviewed, and the required check a caller was told to add is now green. That is the same class as ledger — a green merge gate over a run that reviewed nothing — reached by toggling a label rather than by a job dying.

The asymmetry with Blocking gate is the tell, and it is already written down in this file. That job's job-level if: is unconditional, deliberately: "Running unconditionally makes the verdict event-independent." Its guard step then exempts "should_run=false events and the already_reviewed re-trigger" — but those exemptions are safe there because they fall through to the live thread query, which is the whole verdict there. Panel integrity has no equivalent fallback: its verdict exists only as consolidate/post-review job outputs, which do not exist on a run where the panel did not run, so the whole job skips instead.

Not fixing it here, deliberately, and this thread stays open so it is visible at merge time. Every fix needs a source of truth from outside the run — the prior Panel integrity check-run conclusion (checks: read), or the landed review's cell count (pull-requests: read) — and this job is currently pinned by test at permissions: {} with "No API call, no checkout, no network" as a stated property. Choosing which prior-state source to read, and granting a credential to a job that was deliberately built to hold none, is a design decision rather than a patch, and it is not one to make on a PR that is already green through three review rounds. Filed as a follow-up needing a human rather than an autonomous coder, for that reason.

Two things that are not the answer, for whoever picks it up: making the job unconditional and exiting 0 on the no-panel branches is strictly worse (an explicit green supersedes the red instead of a skip doing it), and exiting 1 there turns every label toggle into a permanent red for blocking callers.

Worth weighing at merge: this does not make the PR wrong — a red Panel integrity is still strictly more signal than today's silent green — but it does mean the "require Panel integrity" advice in the setup guide is not yet the durable merge gate that section describes. It may be worth landing that caveat in the guide alongside the fix.

[mattmillerai]

Landed the docs half of this in 3d0b477, and left the code and this thread exactly as you set them.

Re-derived the mechanism from the source before writing it, and it holds end to end:

• The job if: (cursor-review.yml:2723) short-circuits on needs.gate.result == 'success' && (should_run != 'true' || already_reviewed == 'true'), so every deliberate no-panel branch skips the job rather than reaching a verdict step.
• Gate's dup-check (cursor-review.yml:~558) keys already_reviewed on commit_id == HEAD_SHA plus a Bot-authored review whose body starts with the consolidated marker — so on a run that went red for a short panel (as opposed to "nothing delivered"), the review did land at that SHA and a whole-workflow re-run sets already_reviewed=true.

Which makes the guide's own remediation the sharpest instance: the "Re-run failed jobs" paragraph told callers to prefer re-running the whole workflow, and that is precisely the action that supersedes the red with a skip. The page recommended the thing that hides the signal it had just told you to require. That part I did not want to leave standing until BE-15604 lands, because it is not a gap in the caveat list — it is active advice pointing the wrong way.

So, docs only, no behaviour change:

• docs/callers/cursor-review.md — a new shape in the "before you require it" list covering supersession on the same head SHA (the trigger set: toggled label, skip-cursor-review, removed trigger label, already-reviewed re-trigger), with the remediation being push a new commit — a fresh SHA gets its own verdict — rather than re-triggering on the reviewed one, and read the check's run history rather than only its latest conclusion. The re-run paragraph now points at it instead of silently recommending into it.
• .github/cursor-review/README.md — the same limit beside the existing forgery limit, so the internals doc does not read as though prompt-injection is the only thing Panel integrity cannot promise.

Both name BE-15604 so the caveat has an expiry rather than becoming permanent folklore. Your framing is carried across verbatim: a red Panel integrity is still strictly more signal than today's silent green — the caveat scopes the "require it" advice, it does not retract it.

Leaving this thread unresolved, per your reasoning: the design decision is still the merger's, and BE-15603's pre-bump required-check audit on the sibling thread is still outstanding. Nothing here reduces what a human needs to weigh at merge time.

[mattmillerai]

🤖 The reviews loop filed Linear follow-up ticket(s) for review thread(s) deferred as out of scope for this PR:

• BE-15603 — Audit consumer required-check lists for the cursor-review caller job before bumping the panel-integrity SHA — filed as agent-spike (premise unverified)
• BE-15604 — Make cursor-review's Panel integrity verdict event-independent so a later no-panel run cannot supersede a red with a skip — filed as agent-spike (premise unverified)

The following carry agent-spike instead of agent-ok because their reachability claim was not backed by evidence (BE-5378) — the claim is investigated before any code is written, and "the premise does not hold" is a valid, successful outcome:

• Audit consumer required-check lists for the cursor-review caller job before bumping the panel-integrity SHA — no reachability block in the proposal
• Make cursor-review's Panel integrity verdict event-independent so a later no-panel run cannot supersede a red with a skip — no reachability block in the proposal

[mattmillerai]

Merged main into the branch (695861d) and re-verified the merged result, because the base had moved under this PR with a commit touching the same file: #321 (84db66a, incremental hunks block built as a subset of the reviewed diff).

No textual conflict — cursor-review.yml auto-merged — and no semantic one either. Checked the specific interaction rather than trusting the clean merge:

• fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 adds only a step (id: incremental) inside the existing diff-size job. It adds no job, renames no job, and changes no job output, so every needs.* reference Panel integrity reads is untouched.
• The one real interaction is that diff-size gains a new way to fail — and that is already the fail-closed path this PR built: a non-success diff-size under a fresh in-scope review admits the job, and Fail if the panel decision itself did not complete turns it red. The new failure mode lands on the covered branch, not an uncovered one.
• The matrix-needs: vs Panel integrity-needs: invariant test is what would catch a job added to review's needs: without being added here; it passes on the merged tree.

Full suites on the merged tree, all green: cursor-review 707 passed (650 + the 57 #321 brought), workflow-pins 502 passed / 29 skipped, agents-md-integrity 46 passed. check_workflow_pins.py (156 uses: pinned, 11 workflows_ref declared, 0 exempt), check_agents_md.py and check-org-repo-literals.sh all rc=0; shellcheck clean. PR checks are green on the pushed merge.

No code change this round, and no thread resolved: the two open threads are open on purpose — the staging decision (BE-15603) and the same-head-SHA supersession caveat (BE-15604) are both the merger's call, and both are already filed as follow-ups. Nothing above changes what a human needs to weigh at merge time.

[mattmillerai]

Pushed 76aa262. One real defect, and it is a semantic conflict from merging #321 — the class a clean textual merge hides, which the previous pass checked for and did not find here.

Panel integrity reads diff-size's incremental_subset and failed on a literal false, with ::error::"the cells were prioritized onto hunks that were not in scope". Both halves of that were written while the output was still unpublished. #321 (84db66a) changed them without touching a line of this job:

• The output exists now. diff-size declares it at cursor-review.yml:796, so the "empty string, inert BY DESIGN" note in the env block and the "wired but inert" bullet in the setup guide were each stating something false about a live check.
• false no longer means what the message said. fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321 made the subset check fail closed: a block that does not verify is : > "$NEW_PATCH" — discarded whole — and the panel reviews the full reviewed diff alone. So the cells were never prioritized onto out-of-scope hunks; they got no prioritization hint at all. That is byte-identical input to a run that never built a block (round 1, every "could not build one" branch) — and those report true. fix(cursor-review): build the incremental hunks block as a subset of the reviewed diff #321's own commit message says the same independently: "discarded whole and annotated, and the panel runs on the full diff alone."

So the cause was reddening Panel integrity — the one context this PR tells callers to mark required — over a run whose reviewed content is indistinguishable from a normal one, with nothing skipped and no finding suppressed. It was also the only cause that never indicated a short panel, which is the sole question the check answers.

It now emits a non-failing ::warning:: describing what actually happens, pointing at the Incremental diff discarded warning on Diff size check for the counts. A non-subset block is still a real builder defect worth surfacing — it is just not a panel-integrity failure. The other five causes are untouched and still fail the check.

test_a_discarded_incremental_block_is_not_a_failing_cause pins it, because nothing else can: publishing an output inverted this job's meaning without editing it. Mutation-checked — restoring the ::error:: + causes increment turns it red (1 failure) against a green control, tree restored byte-identical after.

Docs corrected to match in docs/callers/cursor-review.md; both README cause lists never enumerated this cause, so they are correct as they stand. Body updated, including the three places it repeated the stale claim.

Green from a clean isolated worktree after the commit: cursor-review 708 passed, workflow-pins 502 passed / 29 skipped, check_workflow_pins.py OK (11 workflows, 156 refs pinned), check_agents_md.py --root . passed with the same 2 pre-existing warnings, check-org-repo-literals.sh rc=0, shellcheck -x clean.

Both review threads are left unresolved exactly as the earlier passes set them — the staging decision and the same-head-SHA supersession are the merger's calls, and their follow-ups (BE-15603, BE-15604) are already filed.

[mattmillerai]

Merged main into the branch (006191b) and re-verified the merged result, because the base moved again under this PR with two commits — and one of them, #322 (9bda5ab), touches the same file and the same subsystem this job reads from.

No textual conflict — cursor-review.yml, .github/cursor-review/README.md and docs/callers/cursor-review.md all auto-merged — and no semantic one either. As with the #321 round, I checked the specific interaction rather than trusting the clean merge:

• fix(cursor-review): record each round's merge base and pin the incremental block's OLD patch to it #322 adds outputs, not jobs. It declares last_reviewed_merge_base on ledger and merge_base_sha on diff-size, and adds a Resolve this round's merge base step. It adds no job and renames none, so the needs.* references Panel integrity reads are untouched.
• The needs: invariant still holds. fix(cursor-review): record each round's merge base and pin the incremental block's OLD patch to it #322 did add one edge — post-review now needs diff-size — but panel-integrity already needs diff-size, so its needs: remains a superset of review's plus the decision jobs. The matrix-needs: invariant test, which is what would catch a job added to review's needs: without being added here, passes on the merged tree.
• The incremental_subset semantics this job depends on are unchanged. This is the one that mattered, since 76aa262 had just reclassified false from an error to a warning on the strength of what false means. fix(cursor-review): record each round's merge base and pin the incremental block's OLD patch to it #322 adds four new "can't build one" branches (no recorded merge base, an unreachable or non-ancestor recorded merge base, a failed or empty OLD build, an oversized OLD) — and every one of them lands in the no-block family, which leaves the default incremental_subset=true standing. The only writer of false is still the byte-for-byte subset fail-safe, i.e. still exactly "a block was built and then discarded". The warning-not-error treatment and the prose justifying it both remain accurate.
• The merged docs are coherent. fix(cursor-review): record each round's merge base and pin the incremental block's OLD patch to it #322's merge-base/round-sentinel prose and this PR's Panel integrity section sit side by side without contradicting each other; both still state that incremental_subset is false only in the discard case.

Full suites on the merged tree, all green: cursor-review 751 passed (707 + the 44 #322 brought), workflow-pins 502 passed / 29 skipped, agents-md-integrity 46 passed. check_workflow_pins.py (156 uses: pinned, 11 workflows_ref declared, 0 exempt), check_agents_md.py (its 2 pre-existing warnings) and check-org-repo-literals.sh all rc=0; shellcheck clean. PR checks are green on the pushed merge, and the PR is MERGEABLE / CLEAN.

Unchanged: both open threads stay open on purpose — the staging decision (BE-15603's pre-bump required-check audit) and the supersession design decision (BE-15604) are the merger's to weigh, not mine.