Fifth episode in SFEIR's series on the augmented SDLC, devoted to the Review phase, published the same day as the Addy Osmani LinkedIn post it converts into a phase specification.

The starting observation: quality used to be read in the code; agents now produce more of it than anyone can review. It has therefore changed address — it now lives in the ring of constraints surrounding the agent, that is, in the harness. Seven dimensions make up this ring (correctness, security, performance, accessibility, maintainability, economic efficiency, comprehensibility), linked by the back-pressure rule: a loop is only granted the autonomy that can be verified cheaply and reliably. The corollary overturns the dominant intuition: the bottleneck has never been generation, it is verification — "generation is a wide mouth, verification a narrow neck; speeding up the mouth thickens the pile at the neck."

Hence the central architecture decision: in the eleven-phase cycle, Review is not a human gate, and this is deliberate. The three inviolable gates are Define, Plan, and Ship. Making Review carry the gate would put human attention — a finite resource — as the control point of a generation that itself scales: the neck would never widen. Review instruments, Ship decides; Review produces an opposable body of evidence, and the decision is made on the evidence, not the full diff. SFEIR retains from Monperrus that human inspection of every diff cannot withstand agentic speed, but rejects his conclusion: acceptance cannot be delegated.

The operational translation is a dimension-by-dimension table, separating what can be mechanized from irreducibly human judgment. The dimension systematically forgotten is comprehensibility, "because it doesn't break CI" — hence the cheapest remedy on the grid: having the agent log what it tried and discarded, since "intent is not lost, it is discarded."

The named failure mode is circular validation: the agent that writes the code writes the tests that validate it, CI is green, "you built a mirror, not a ring." Five countermeasures are drawn from Anthropic (independent gates, deterministic + agentic, shadow mode, risk-based tiering, SIEM logging), and Compare the Market warns that a reviewer built on vector RAG degrades review quality (~70% for an AST graph versus ~58%).

The firm's own extension is the ratchet, attached to Compound-1: every escape becomes a constraint. The ring thickens with every cycle — "the only asset in the chain that appreciates while the models depreciate" (−30% fix iterations after ten cycles, internal measurement). Only one question remains: what does my system refuse to let through?