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Agentic Pairing skill family

Scope. Works on any project, ASF or not — no Apache-Software-Foundation-specific assumptions baked in.

Developer-side pre-flight review skills that run in the maintainer’s or contributor’s own dev loop — after local changes are ready but before opening a PR. The family absorbs mechanical implementation-detail review so the eventual human-to-human conversation between contributor and maintainer stays on design, reasoning, and the trade-offs the project cares about.

Mentorship is intrinsic. Agentic Pairing skills are not a replacement for human code review; they are a pre-flight filter that separates implementation-detail nits (formatting, convention violations, obvious logical gaps) from the design-level conversation the project’s contributor-to-committer path is built on.

No state changes. Every skill in this family reads local git state and returns a structured report. No PR is opened, no GitHub write happens, no comment is posted, and the working tree is never mutated.

Skills

Skill Purpose Status
pairing-self-review Structured pre-flight self-review of local changes against a configurable base. Single-pass: correctness, security, and conventions in one report. experimental
pairing-multi-agent-review Fan the same diff through three independent axis-focused passes (correctness, security, conventions); merge findings with deduplication and severity ranking. Higher confidence than a single pass; each axis is isolated so findings cannot cross-contaminate. experimental

When to use which

  • pairing-self-review — the default quick check. Fast, single context, covers correctness + security + conventions.
  • pairing-multi-agent-review — when you want adversarial independence between review axes. Each pass cannot see the others’ findings, so a security issue buried in a conventions sweep cannot get lost. Use for changes touching security-sensitive paths or for the final check before a high-stakes PR.

Both skills are read-only / hand-back and produce the same structured report format, so you can switch between them without changing your workflow.

Relationship to pr-management-code-review

pairing-self-review and pairing-multi-agent-review run before a PR is open. Once a PR is open and you want a maintainer-side deep code review of an incoming contribution, use pr-management-code-review instead.

Adopter contract

The Agentic Pairing skills have no project-specific config files. They resolve two standard placeholders from the adopter’s <project-config>/:

Placeholder Resolved from
<upstream> project.md → upstream_repo (owner/name of the public source repo)
<default-branch> project.md → upstream_default_branch (e.g. main)

No additional config files are required. The skills do not write to the project’s tracker, label set, or any shared infrastructure.

Status

Experimental. Both pairing-self-review and pairing-multi-agent-review are shipped and validate under skill-and-tool-validate. No adopter-pilot evaluation has run yet; shape may change between framework versions.

To provide pilot feedback, copy docs/pilot-report-template.md into your project notes, fill in each section, and optionally validate the filled-in report with:

uv run --project tools/pilot-report-validator pilot-report-validate <your-report.md>

Cross-references

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