// Section 10 — Human and Vibe review · 2 MIN READ

[✓] VERIFIED MANUAL ENTRY — This concept has been rewritten from primary sources and is legally cleared for production.

Human Review

The final verification gate where a developer reads the primary code diff produced by an agent to judge its correctness, architecture, and safety.

Human review is the final checkpoint where the developer inspects the code generated by an agent. It represents the ultimate safety gate: while automated systems check compile rules, only a human can judge whether the code should exist, if the architecture fits the codebase, and if the security model is sound.

You perform a human review whenever you:

  • Open a Pull Request diff to inspect the changes made by an agent.
  • Run git diff in your terminal to review edits before staging.
  • Inspect a generated schema file before running a migration script.

Narration is Not the Artifact

The core rule of human review is: review the primary code diff, never the agent's explanation.

Agents are highly fluent and persuasive. At the end of a session, an agent might output a summary: "I've cleaned up the dead code in the router and verified everything works."

  • The Trap: If you read only the summary (secondary source), you are trusting the agent's account of its own work.
  • The Reality: If you open the code diff (primary source), you might discover that the agent accidentally deleted a function that is referenced dynamically in a generated file, breaking the runtime.
Summary (Agent's Story) ────► Plausible / Safe ────► Traps Developer
Actual Git Diff (Code)  ────► The Hard Reality ────► Reveals Hidden Bugs

To optimize human review, layer your checks. Let Automated Checks catch the syntax errors, let Automated Reviews filter out formatting issues, and save your expensive human attention for structural decisions.

Field Applications

Place review checkpoints early in the lifecycle:

  • Early Review: Review the agent's plan or spec file before it starts writing code. Fixing a plan takes 2 minutes; refactoring 15 broken files takes an hour.

# AVOID

Do not accept pull requests or commit files based purely on the model's chat summaries. Always inspect the code diff.

  • Avoid: "The agent says it updated the auth config successfully, so I'll merge it."
  • Write: Open the git diff, inspect the environment variable updates, and merge only after verification.

# USAGE

Developer A: "I'm reviewing the agent's branch. The summary says it only updated styling, but the build is failing." Developer B: "Don't trust the narration. Open the git diff and review the primary source. You'll see it edited our layout wrapper class and accidentally stripped the child slots."

// SEE_ALSO

Automated ReviewThe process where a secondary model (with a fresh context window) reviews the diff generated by a working agent to catch design flaws, security risks, or contract breaks.
Automated CheckA deterministic verification tool run locally (lints, typechecks, builds, test suites) that gives the agent binary pass/fail logs to self-correct from.
Vibe CodingA working pattern where the developer accepts the agent's code modifications blindly without conducting code diff reviews, judging progress strictly by runtime behavior.
Primary SourceThe original, raw source of truth (e.g. active code files, terminal test logs, database rows) rather than summaries or descriptions of them.

// SOCRATIC_VALIDATION

Interactive Concept Quiz

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