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Architecture · Version 1.1.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Specification Review Consistency Agent

Make a defensible decision about cross-artifact consistency review and requirement-to-plan traceability with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Checks requirements, design, implementation plan, and tests for contradictions, omissions, and untraceable decisions. It grounds the decision in requirements, architecture decisions, implementation plan, acceptance tests, constraints, and approved changes and explicitly prevents each artifact looking reasonable alone while terminology, constraints, or acceptance behavior disagree across documents.

₹199 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Cross-artifact consistency review
  • Requirement-to-plan traceability
  • Specification contradiction detection

How Specification Review Consistency Agent works

You provide

Requirements, constraints, and the current topology

It inspects

Critical path and failure boundaries for cross-artifact consistency review

It decides

A requirement-to-plan traceability decision with consequences recorded

You verify

Rollout stages with the signal that gates each one

What it checks first

Specification Review Consistency Skill checks requirements, design, implementation plan, and tests for contradictions, omissions, and untraceable decisions. It grounds the decision in requirements, architecture decisions, implementation plan, acceptance tests, constraints, and approved changes and explicitly prevents each artifact looking reasonable alone while terminology, constraints, or acceptance behavior disagree across documents. Use it when the work involves Cross-artifact consistency review, Requirement-to-plan traceability, Specification contradiction detection.

  1. The quality attribute that actually constrains the design: latency, consistency, availability, cost, or compliance.
  2. The critical path and the number of network hops on it.
  3. Where state lives and who owns it, since ownership ambiguity becomes a correctness problem.
  4. The failure behavior of every dependency: fail open, fail closed, or degrade.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Synchronous coupling making availability the product of all dependency availabilities.
  • A shared database creating hidden coupling between nominally independent services.
  • A component with no clear owner, so its failure has no defined response.
  • Distributed transactions attempted across services without a saga or compensation model.

Answers it will reject

  • Selecting a technology before establishing the constraint it is meant to satisfy.
  • Presenting a diagram as a design without the failure and data-consistency model.
  • Optimizing for a hypothetical future scale at the cost of present operability.

Decision rules it applies

  • Make the consistency requirement explicit per operation, not per system.
  • Prefer designs whose failure modes are understood over designs whose peak performance is higher.
  • Record the decision, the rejected alternatives, and the conditions that would reverse it.

Evidence it asks for

  • Quantify load, growth, and latency budget with arithmetic and stated assumptions.
  • Define the rollout stages and the signal that gates each one.
  • Name the reversal path for the decision.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to cross-artifact consistency review.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for requirement-to-plan traceability; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize specification contradiction detection findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Cross-artifact consistency review assessment
  • Requirement-to-plan traceability decision and action plan
  • Specification contradiction detection verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Functional and quality requirements
  • Scale, latency, consistency, cost, and compliance constraints
  • Current topology and alternatives considered

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Apply the specification review consistency agent to our current cross-artifact consistency review work. We need a concrete decision, bounded changes, and evidence that the result is correct.

Expected output

Start with requirements, architecture decisions, implementation plan, acceptance tests, constraints, and approved changes. The highest-risk failure is each artifact looking reasonable alone while terminology, constraints, or acceptance behavior disagree across documents. Create a bidirectional trace for every material requirement and surface conflicts before judging implementation detail. Verify the result by following every requirement through design, plan, and tests and confirming every added design constraint has authority.

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Cross-artifact consistency review: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Requirement-to-plan traceability: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Specification contradiction detection: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Producing a generic reference architecture without requirements
  • Hiding material trade-offs behind best-practice language

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot Agent Skills
  • Cursor Agent Skills
  • Claude Code Skills
  • OpenAI Codex Skills
  • JetBrains Junie Skills

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.