/tribunal

description: Deep, rarely-convened whole-codebase audit — eleven specialist lenses, a resumable on-disk audit log, findings filed as GitHub issues on approval. Expensive; estimates cost and STOPs before running. Never a required gate.
argument-hint: "[scope-path] [--tag <label>]"

{{CMD:tribunal}} — deep codebase audit

The deepest, most expensive review codeArbiter offers, convened rarely and on demand. Routes to the tribunal skill. Eleven lenses judge the codebase; every finding persists to its own file (plus append-only triage/run logs) under `.codearbiter/reports/<run-id>/`, so an interrupted run resumes from disk. Never a required gate — critical/high are blocking-severity findings, not a pipeline halt.

Cost first — this lane routinely costs millions of tokens on a large repo. Phase 0 sizes the codebase, prints a token-cost band, recommends the highest-reasoning model, and STOPs for your acknowledgement before dispatching anything. Nothing runs unacknowledged.

Flow

Load and follow the tribunal skill (`{{PLUGIN_ROOT}}/skills/tribunal/SKILL.md`). In brief:

Phase 0 (STOP) — cost estimate, model recommendation, resume check. Phase 1 (BLOCK) — map the codebase; risk-rank and mark trust boundaries; record AI-authorship markers and iteration depth. Phase 2 (BLOCK) — dispatch the eleven tribunal-* lenses in priority waves (≤5 in flight); each writes one file per finding under its own `findings/<lens>/` dir. Phase 3 (BLOCK) — triage per wave from disk: dedup, independent calibration, decision vocabulary. Phase 4 (BLOCK) — project the human-readable report from the logs. Phase 5 (BLOCK) — on explicit selection, file findings as GitHub issues; idempotent against the tracker. Phase 6 (STOP) — optional, opt-in KPI telemetry to the public codeArbiter repo.

Arguments

`"scope-path"` — focus the audit on a subtree (default: repository root). The full lens roster still runs; only the scope narrows.

`--tag <label>` — freeform run label recorded in telemetry (see `references/telemetry.md`).

Routes to

`{{PLUGIN_ROOT}}/skills/tribunal/SKILL.md` — dispatches the eleven tribunal-* reviewers (and, on a large repo, the optional map-structure / map-deps mappers).

When NOT to use

• A review of the current diff → `{{CMD:review}}` (gate-blocking, fast).
• A lean periodic sweep → `{{CMD:checkpoint}}` (cheap, frequent; tribunal is its rare, deep counterpart).
• An adversarial STRIDE pass on one sensitive feature → `{{CMD:threat-model}}`.
• A governance packet for a window → `{{CMD:audit}}`.
• Anything on a schedule or in a hot loop — tribunal is a rare, deliberate, expensive convening, not a routine gate.

Hard gate

MUST NOT dispatch any lens before you acknowledge the Phase 0 cost estimate. MUST NOT act as a required gate or block a merge/commit. MUST NOT file an issue or send telemetry without explicit authorization. Read-only on project code until the filing gate; findings file as GitHub issues, never the task board.