AI Diff Reviewer addon

Every Deep Work Plan closes the same way: a mandatory Final Review that reads the plan’s entire accumulated change set before the work can be called done. Its security pass is the last point at which anything gets caught. Without help, the only reader at that point is the same agent that wrote the code.

This addon puts a second reader on that diff. It wires the AI Diff Reviewer — listed on the marketplace as “AI Diff Reviewer”, currently v2.3.1 — into the security pass, where it returns something structured rather than prose: a verdict, a findings table, and a severity on each finding. A critical finding blocks completion until it is fixed or explicitly accepted. The review is a gate, not a comment.

Since standard 2.3.0 that local review is part of the baseline, not an extra. Onboarding installs it; every Final Review runs it. What stays optional is the CI surface — Flow B, where the same review gates pull requests through the GitHub Action.

The boundary that makes this safe to adopt is deliberately narrow. The reviewer is an MIT-licensed, tag-pinned skill executed by the coding agent you already run, so no Deep Work Plan flow depends on a commercial service, a CI provider, or a secret. Flow A (local-only) is what every onboarded repository gets; Flow B is offered explicitly and never installed unrequested. A developer may also decline the reviewer outright — that decline is recorded as a declared exception, and verify reports the repository as non-conformant on that point until it is installed.

When to use it

Two adoption flows

Detection for the local review requires skill + an extension file at one of: .review/extension.md, .github/ai-diff-reviewer/extension.md, or .github/ai-pr-reviewer/extension.md. Skill alone is not enough.

What this addon wires (narrow by design)

The DWP addon does not reinvent the reviewer. It defers install, methodology, the CI wizard, extension authoring, PR drafting, and post-CI walkthrough to the upstream skill’s five sub-skills (parent default flow, generate-extension, setup, open-pr, apply-review).

The required local review

create adds the local review step to every Final Review’s security pass and execute runs it. Output appends under ## AI Diff Reviewer local review in the plan-local analysis_results/SECURITY_REVIEW.md (inside the plan’s own folder, never the repository root).

• Missing reviewer — recorded, never skipped silently: a missing skill or extension becomes a local reviewer not installed finding; Final Review runs the local pass when the skill is present and otherwise carries the finding into the completion report — installation belongs to the onboarding consent or an explicit addon invocation, never a surprise bootstrap.
• Soft-fail (invocation only): a review that could start but errors → warn once, record, continue; never fail the task for that miss.
• Gate after a completed pass: critical findings still block Final Review completion until fixed or explicitly accepted. warning / info are documented but non-blocking.
• Flow A needs no CI secret. An unset CURSOR_API_KEY must not suppress the local pass.

Flow B CI gate (optional)

Action DailybotHQ/ai-diff-reviewer@v2, typically label-gated (ready), with a stable-named AI review gate job for branch protection and opt-in skip-review-label: skip-ai-review. Shared prompt.md + extension align methodology and severity; under Iteration-Aware Review, CI round 2+ may be shorter while the local pass stays full.

Optional apply-review companion

After CI posts a review, the developer may invoke apply-review during execute to walk findings per-finding (apply / defer / skip) with consent. Read-only by default; never a plan task file (would break mandatory final-task order). Since v2.3.1 a review body that says Recommendation: approve is not evidence the check passed — read the tracking marker’s Highest severity / Strictness gate / Check status block first.

What changed since v2.0.1

Four upstream releases landed between v2.0.1 and v2.3.1. None of them changes how this addon wires the reviewer — Flow A, the three detection paths and the blocking contract are unchanged — but they change what an adopter gets.

Two of these matter more than the rest for the methodology.

The incomplete-review gate closes a real hole in the security pass. A Final Review must not be able to close on a review that did not happen. Before v2.2.0 a runner that exited without producing findings was indistinguishable from a clean pass. It is now a named, non-green state, so “no findings” means the reviewer looked and found nothing rather than that it never looked.

economy is deliberately not cheaper. The upstream benchmark of 2026-09-16 measured grok-4.3 at 0 of 5 known defects — it approves without reviewing — while grok-4.5 matched grok-4.6 at 3 of 5 with no false positives, at the same cost and a quarter of the wall time. Since no cheaper xAI model still reviews, economy resolves to the same model as balanced rather than being a tier that finds nothing. The xAI path therefore moves from roughly $0.07 to roughly $0.40–0.75 per review through the CLI; model: grok-4.3 can still be pinned explicitly to keep the earlier behaviour. These figures are upstream’s published measurements, not Deep Work Plan’s own.

A review that says approve is not evidence the check passed. Since v2.3.1 the runtime writes the Check status block after computing the gate, and rewrites a model Recommendation: approve when the gate is failing. That is the contract apply-review — and a Final Review that reads a CI review — must follow.

Behavior

• Flow A is the baseline; Flow B is asked, never guessed. Installing a workflow unrequested is a larger footprint than staying on Flow A.
• Reconcile, don’t clobber. Existing skill, extension, or pr-review.yml are preserved; fill gaps only.
• Auth deferred. Provider secrets for CI are maintainer-configured; this addon never stores credentials.
• Vendor-neutral. No commercial service, CI provider, or secret is ever required; the CI surface is the only piece that touches a provider.

Notes

Local review required since standard 2.3.0; CI surface optional. Upstream skill: DailybotHQ/ai-diff-reviewer. Spec page: Add-ons.