Two adversarial reviews over the assembled multi-branch diff each returned a blocker that the same class of review had already passed over on the individual branch, and both blockers were branch-local rather than merge-only: a bare git-directory existence check that let a worktree read and enforce an unrelated repository's private name store, and a test fixture built from a live session identifier and carried past the repository's own new detector by three separate escapes in one commit. The lesson is not that more review is better. A reviewer reading one branch in isolation judges the diff against itself, while a reviewer reading the assembled tree judges it against the repository's stated invariants and notices a change that contradicts one. Worth recording in the reviews charter as the reason an integration-level pass is not redundant with the per-branch pass, and worth giving the per-branch reviewer the invariants explicitly rather than hoping it infers them.

Two adversarial reviews over the assembled multi-branch diff each returned a blocker that the same class of review had already passed over on the individual branch, and both blockers were branch-local rather than merge-only: a bare git-directory existence check that let a worktree read and enforce an unrelated repository's private name store, and a test fixture built from a live session identifier and carried past the repository's own new detector by three separate escapes in one commit. The lesson is not that more review is better. A reviewer reading one branch in isolation judges the diff against itself, while a reviewer reading the assembled tree judges it against the repository's stated invariants and notices a change that contradicts one. Worth recording in the reviews charter as the reason an integration-level pass is not redundant with the per-branch pass, and worth giving the per-branch reviewer the invariants explicitly rather than hoping it infers them.

Remedy grounds (2026-09-29)

• Both blockers were branch-local and missed per branch, so the cheap fix is to hand the per-branch reviewer the invariants, and the reason line keeps the integration pass from being cut as duplicate work.
• SOTA check: Google's engineering practices (https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/reviewer/looking-for.html, read 2026-09-29) make design fit with the rest of the system the first thing a reviewer checks and tell the reviewer to read beyond the diff's lines; the invariants list is this repository's form of that context.
• Rejected: a second full per-branch pass, which the principle's delta-only rule forbids.