Static review and design councils miss bugs that only surface when code meets real input. This does the opposite: agents whose job is to break the code by driving the real system. On shux task 078 this pattern found a shipped-blocking bug (a validator that rejected ❤️ ⚠️ emoji) that both the author and three design councils had passed over.
When
Standard step for any nontrivial feature / schema / contract / parser / serializer / protocol / state machine / security or freeze guard — after it compiles green, before the final dootsabha convergence review and before "done". Skip only for trivial or mechanical changes.
Method
- Split the attack surface into 2–4 disjoint areas (e.g. round-trip & canonicalization · the verdict/state model · the security/guard). One agent per area. Run them in parallel, in the background.
- Charter each agent (template below): its ONE surface, the PROMISE to falsify, 5–10 concrete hostile inputs, and the hard rule — drive the real system; do not reason from the source alone.
- Independently reproduce every finding before believing it. Agents over- and under-claim; a confident report is a hypothesis. Turn each real defect into a failing test first.
- Fix + pin. Every confirmed defect gets a fix AND a regression test (or a new proptest-generator case) so it cannot return.
- Feed forward. Record which vectors were verified clean and any out-of-scope findings for the owning task.
Charter template
ADVERSARIAL review. Read-only; report findings, do not edit. Target:
<file / surface>. Drive the REAL system — build a scratch harness with a path-dep, or run the real binary, and feed it hostile input. Do NOT reason from source alone; that is where the sharpest bugs hide. PROMISE to falsify:<the invariant — e.g. "any real input round-trips losslessly", "exactly one canonical encoding", "masked content never leaks", "the guard cannot be bypassed">. Attack vectors — for each, say REAL BUG or CORRECTLY HANDLED, withfile:line, the exact triggering input, and whether an existing test catches it:<5–10 concrete hostile inputs>. Rank BLOCKER / MAJOR / MINOR. If the code is correct on an attack, say so in one line. End with a ranked defect list + a concrete failing test for the top 3.
Discipline
- Real system > reasoning. The blocker on 078 came from an agent that RAN the real
VT on
❤️; static reasoning (and the author) dismissed the same vector as theoretical. - Your own self-checks are not a substitute. Expect to be wrong about your own code — that is the entire point of the pass.
- Verify before fixing. Reproduce independently; downgrade what you can't.
Anti-patterns
- Overlapping charters → agents duplicate work and leave gaps. Keep areas disjoint.
- "Review this file" → invites static reading. Always say drive the real system.
- One mega-agent → weaker than N focused parallel ones.
- Trusting a finding without an independent repro, or fixing without a regression test.