Personal Assistant Review Follow-up

Core Rule

Use this skill after personal-assistant-review or any review that produced findings for the current personal-assistant repository.

The goal is not to fix every review comment. The goal is to separate real release risk from optional polish, get the needed decision, implement only the confirmed fix set, and verify the result without over-claiming.

Hard boundary: do not make product decisions while fixing review findings. If a finding can be fixed by removing, hiding, narrowing, or adding friction to a user-facing capability, ask the user before coding unless the user already made that exact product choice in this conversation and it still applies, or the fix restores a current accepted product contract. An agent-authored approval is not evidence of a user decision.

Workflow

1. Verify each finding against its exact trigger, affected code, and current contract before restating it. Separate verified defects from hypotheses; reviewer confidence or severity is not evidence.
2. Classify each finding:
   • must-fix: correctness, data safety, privacy, user-visible breakage, product-contract violation, release blocker, or a direct failure of the current patch's stated goal.
   • should-fix-now: small, local fix that prevents a likely regression or stabilizes the changed behavior, even if not release-blocking.
   • defer: polish, theoretical failure path, localized copy cleanup without product-contract or safety impact, refactor preference, or risk without a concrete trigger.
3. Calibrate severity again against that evidence. A readability concern should identify a concrete change entry, responsibility, or invariant that is hard to follow. Style preferences or speculative risks alone do not justify a refactor, broader scope, or a full validation gate.
4. Identify decision points before coding.
5. If the user only asked for analysis or explicitly required read-only work, make no writes; stop after the classification and decision options.
6. Ask for an unresolved product decision when viable fixes materially differ in behavior or user effort. Reuse applicable user decisions and current accepted contracts; do not infer a decision from reviewer severity.
7. Implement the confirmed fix set only after the user explicitly asks to implement or fix it. If that authorization already exists in this conversation and still covers the fix set, proceed without asking again.
8. Add a regression test for the accepted runtime trigger when needed; do not add tests that merely assert documentation wording.
9. Validate with focused checks, then app smoke only when the changed surface needs deployed Obsidian evidence.

Product choices requiring a decision when not already resolved by applicable user authority or a current accepted contract:

• Removing or hiding a visible control, command, workflow, or shortcut.
• Increasing or decreasing confirmation burden for durable, provider-backed, cost-bearing, privacy-sensitive, or future-behavior-changing actions.
• Choosing between safety/trust and the product goal of reducing user burden.
• Changing product copy, information architecture, queue/batch behavior, or review cadence in a way that changes what users can do.
• Reinterpreting a current product doc, roadmap, tracker, or user-stated product principle.

When an unresolved product decision appears, present the smallest viable options with a recommendation and tradeoff. Do not continue into code edits for that decision until the user chooses; continue independent authorized fixes.

Decision Lens

Use three lenses when the user asks whether findings need decisions.

Architecture:

• Define ownership and invariants, not just symptoms.
• Prefer boundaries already used by the touched modules.
• If a fix only masks one UI symptom but leaves concurrent semantics undefined, ask for or propose the invariant.

Program:

• Decide whether the implementation should reject, serialize, dedupe, or reuse in-flight work.
• Prefer a minimal helper or state flag when the invariant is local.
• Avoid broad refactors unless the finding proves an existing abstraction is misleading or dangerous.

Product:

• Decide what the user should see and what should not happen twice.
• Protect provider-backed, cost-bearing, destructive, or persistent actions from accidental duplicate execution.
• Preserve the user's product intent and local product docs even when a reviewer suggests a safer but higher-burden alternative.
• For Memory, Review Queue, Pagelet, and other review surfaces, explicitly weigh the burden of extra confirmations against trust and source evidence.
• Keep ordinary copy in the product language for the touched surface. Internal terms are acceptable in diagnostics, logs, and developer-only output.

Fix Discipline

• Do not fix deferred findings unless the user explicitly adds them to the confirmed fix set.
• Do not make opportunistic changes outside the confirmed fix set.
• Preserve user edits and existing uncommitted changes.
• Use apply_patch for manual edits.
• Per AGENTS.md Testing Instructions, do not claim Obsidian validation without deployed evidence.

Validation

Start with the smallest checks that prove the accepted finding is fixed. For code/DOM changes, run the Local Validation Gate from AGENTS.md, scoped to the affected suites. For plugin command, worker, DOM/CSS, or shared runtime changes, also include npm run lint. For documentation-only fixes, use the relevant documentation checks and git diff --check; do not run runtime gates without a runtime change.

Use Validation Planning And Reuse, Test Failure Diagnosis, and Multi-Agent Validation Coordination in AGENTS.md for evidence reuse, diagnosis, and shared validation ownership. Required phase, device, CI, and release gates still apply; do not assign each subagent a duplicate full gate.

When a finding relies on a probe or checker, confirm the relevant comparison semantics and evidence boundary before treating its output as a product defect. Inspect text matching/normalization, asynchronous completion and cleanup, or repeat-run behavior only where the reported trigger makes them relevant. Reuse existing proof or add the smallest normal/failing examples needed to close a reliability gap before adopting the result; do not require an unrelated matrix. A checker that misclassifies valid behavior needs correction, not a product change to satisfy it or weakened assertions. Record an unresolved checker gap as unverified evidence, not a confirmed product finding or a PASS.

For Obsidian runtime smoke, use obsidian-test-vault-smoke and prefer a provider-free probe unless the accepted fix specifically requires live provider work. If a smoke probe temporarily monkey-patches the loaded test-vault plugin instance, patch only the smallest method needed, restore it in try/finally, and check fresh dev:errors before reporting success.

Output

**Fixed**
- <finding>: <what was done>

**Deferred**
- <finding>: <reason>

**Decisions**
- <architecture/product invariant chosen>

**Validation**
- PASS: `<check>` - <result>
- checks not run / residual risk

**Residual risk**
- <provider paths, real Obsidian UI paths not run, etc.>