`techne:elenchus`¶

Adversarial pre-merge code review. Drives /code-review, then runs the three passes diff-reading skips and applies a fixed bug-class rubric.

ἔλεγχος is the Socratic cross-examination: you do not confirm what the author meant, you hunt the one input that refutes the claim the change rests on.

When to use¶

Before merging any substantive change, especially a self-authored one.
"Review like Ben's robot." / "Hunt edge cases." / "Break this before merge." / "Is this actually mergeable?"
Anything destructive, security-sensitive, or governance-related, at high or ultra effort.

Usage¶

/techne:elenchus

Why it exists¶

The model that writes a change is a poor judge of it: the author reviews what they intended, under ship-it momentum, against a mental model that hides what the code actually does. The fix is not a smarter model but an independent reader running a fixed protocol against the whole repo, reproducing as it goes.

Independence is restored mechanically, not by willpower. /code-review at high spawns independent local agents; ultra runs a multi-agent cloud review. Never hand-read your own diff and call it reviewed.

The three passes¶

/code-review does not force these, so elenchus adds them:

Reproduce the load-bearing claim — run it; check the null, empty, zero-rows, and boundary cells.
Trace every consumer of every changed symbol across the whole repo.
Review against main, not against the +/- of the diff.

The bug classes it hunts¶

Reachable destructive operations, unmirrored guards across parallel code paths, migration crashes, and dead features that still pass CI — the classes that are invisible in a diff and obvious the moment the code is run or its callers traced.

Configuration¶

Reads optional per-repo hints from the ## elenchus section of .claude/skill-context.md: known destructive operations, load-bearing surfaces, reproduce recipes, and what "the feature works" means in this repo. Falls back to ## audit, ## theoros, then the Makefile. Runs without any config.

techne:elenchus¶