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Verification is independent by construction. Two reviewers with different context packets gate completion, and neither is the worker who produced the artifact. Inspect a run’s reviews: 
voss review            # latest run
voss review <run_id>   # a specific run
voss review is read-only — it reads persisted .review.json sidecars and constructs no live providers.

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Reviewer-A — authors the bar

Reviewer-A derives the verification bar from the original human idea — not the EM’s acceptance criteria, tickets, or any prior review. It runs with a fresh memory per card so there is no cross-card bleed.
  • For code cards it authors a test, runs it via shell_run, and the exit code is the verdict.
  • For AI cards it authors a PASS/FAIL rubric, then judges against it.
Worker agents cannot author their own final gate.

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Reviewer-B — judges narrative-blind

Reviewer-B judges the artifact, diff, and Reviewer-A’s verification summary using only the card’s own attributes — original idea, acceptance criteria, artifact, diff, and A’s summary. It sees no EM plan, tickets, or A’s reasoning process, so it cannot be talked into a pass by the orchestrator’s narrative. It runs at two tiers: fast at intermediate gates, strong at the gate to Done. If Reviewer-A’s verification has diverged from what the original idea requires, Reviewer-B can return block to abort the lineage.

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The verdict

Both reviewers emit a frozen ReviewerVerdict:
FieldTypeMeaning
conffloat 0–1Confidence
source"A" | "B"Which reviewer authored it
tier"fast" | "strong"Model tier used
verdict"pass" | "fail" | "block"block aborts the lineage
notesstrReviewer text; appended to retry notes on fail
evidence_refstuple[str, ...]file:line, test names, eval refs
domain_inferred"code" | "ai" | "docs" | "unknown"Inferred work domain

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Persisted artifacts

Each card writes a <node_id>.review.json sidecar (mode 0o600) next to its session-tree node, under .voss/sessions/<root_id>/: 
{
  "a_verification": { "test_path_or_rubric": "...", "result": "pass", "notes": "..." },
  "b_verdict": { "conf": 0.91, "source": "B", "verdict": "pass", "...": "..." },
  "final_outcome": "Done"
}
These sidecars are the evidence the board gates Done on, and the input to voss review.