Given a good decision, an agent implements it faithfully; wherever the task is\nunderspecified, it makes the decision itself — silently, and the diff won't\nflag it. Reviewing thousands of changed lines doesn't scale, and it inspects\nthe execution, which was probably fine. The audit that scales is of the\nchoices: surface every decision the implementer made on its own, judge\nthat list, and record the verdicts.
\nThis is about architecture more than bugs. An implementation can work\nperfectly and still rest on decisions the user never made — a data shape, a\nstorage location, a dependency, an API contract, a tradeoff of memory for\nspeed — and every one of them is load-bearing for future work. The user needs\nto know them not because they're wrong, but because they now own them.
\nThis is purely a decision audit — it is not about modifying code, and it can\nbe called at any time. The job is to trace back: walk every step this\nsession has taken, and every step each subagent took (a live implementer\ntraces its own; otherwise reconstruct from its reports, transcripts, and\ndiffs), and surface every single decision that was made on the user's behalf\nthat was not in the original spec or prompt. The ledger of those decisions\nreplaces reading the code as the user's review surface — that is the whole\npoint. Acting on the verdicts (redoing an unsound choice, applying a\nprovisional call) belongs to the caller: the implementing workflow mid-run,\nor the user after reading the report.
\nTwo ways in, same audit:
\nElicit and trace back. When an implementer reports done, ask: \"While\nworking on this, which choices did you make that you're not confident of?\nList all.\" — but treat the self-report as a starting point, not the\nboundary: agents under-report. Trace the history yourself — the session's\nsteps, subagent reports, diffs, commits — and collect every decision that\nis in the work but not in the original spec or prompt. Sweep the\narchitectural categories, not just the suspect fixes: data shapes and\nformats, storage and naming schemes, API contracts and their error\nbehavior, dependencies added, concurrency/perf tradeoffs, scope\ninterpretations, patterns future code will imitate. Auditing your own\nsession, trace your own steps the same way. Choices the plan explicitly\ndelegated to the implementer are discretion, not audit items.
\nTriage each choice on evidence. Forced by the plan, or invented?\nInvented ones get the scrutiny: is this the general solution, or a fix\nshaped to the one failing case? Verdict per choice: sound, unsound,\nor needs-user — and alongside the verdict, a confidence: how sure\nthe audit is that the user would have made this same call. Confidence is\nwhat ranks the report. Reserve needs-user for genuinely user-only calls\n(taste, product direction, external cost); every needs-user entry records a\nrecommended provisional call that is reversible, so an unsupervised caller\ncan proceed without waiting. The audit never stalls a run: each entry is a\njudgment handed over for action or review, not a question that halts.
\nState the corrected decision, don't sketch a patch. For each unsound\nchoice, the entry names the decision the work should be redone from — the\nproperty that must hold in general — not an edit to layer on top. A patch\non top of a bad decision preserves the decision; the redo itself is the\ncaller's, after the ledger is reviewed.
\nBank every choice in the ledger (below), and promote load-bearing\nsound ones into the plan's handoff so later passes inherit them as givens\ninstead of re-deciding.
\nPresent the ledger: grouped by verdict, ranked by confidence. The\naudit's deliverable is the ledger, handed to whoever acts next — the\ncalling workflow mid-run, the user at run's end. Each verdict group maps\nto an action — needs-user (decide, with the provisional calls), unsound\n(redo, with the corrected decisions), sound (acknowledge: the\narchitecture the user now owns) — and within each group choices are\nranked by confidence, least confident first. When the ledger is long,\nopen the report with the two or three least-confident choices overall,\nwhatever their group: the \"review these first\" line. Sound is not\nskippable. Only trivial discretion (internal naming, cosmetic calls)\ncompresses to a one-line count.
\nWrite every entry ELI5 — by default, not on request. The reader\ndidn't live the session: write each entry in the\neli5 register — a concrete scenario walked end to\nend (the triggering event, what the work does today, what the unbuilt\nalternative would do), every term of art defined at first use, and\npseudocode at the level of the decision when the choice is about control\nflow, ordering, or timing. \"A gated ask is dropped, not deferred\" is a\nheadline, not an entry. A compressed entry that makes the user ask\n\"explain this one\" has failed; the ledger must stand alone without the\ndiff, the spec, or the transcript.
\nA dedicated file that outlives every pass: choices.md beside the plan\n(specs/<feature>/choices.md when a spec owns the work). One entry per\naudited choice:
Rules of the ledger:
\nThe audit is done when every invented choice in the pass has a ledger entry\nwith a verdict, every unsound entry names the corrected decision to redo\nfrom, every needs-user entry carries a reversible provisional call, and the\nledger has been presented — grouped by verdict, least-confident-first within\neach group, every entry readable ELI5 without follow-up questions — to\nwhoever acts next, with the tree untouched. A handback that shows the diff\ninstead of the choices, or a \"fix\" applied during the audit, is not done.
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