Drupal Critic

Overview

Run a harsh-critic style review with Drupal-specific checks, explicit evidence requirements, and context-driven audience perspectives.

External Skill References (No Copy Policy)

Use external skills as references only.

• Canonical reference file: external-skills-manifest.yaml
• Routing policy: skill-routing-map.md

Rules:

• Do not copy external skill body content into this repository.
• Use manifest IDs/URLs and pinned commit metadata for traceability.
• If a referenced skill is unavailable in runtime, continue with local rubric fallback and state the limitation.

Workflow

1. Confirm review target and scope.

2. Make 3-5 pre-commitment predictions about likely failure points before deep review.

3. Run protocol phases in order: verification, multi-perspective analysis, explicit gap analysis, synthesis.

4. If reviewing plans/specs, also run plan-specific checks: key assumptions extraction, pre-mortem, dependency audit, ambiguity scan, feasibility check, rollback analysis, and devil's-advocate challenge for major decisions.

5. Run mandatory self-audit before finalizing findings:

   • LOW confidence or easily-refutable claims move to Open Questions (unscored).
   • Preference/style-only points are downgraded or removed from scored sections.
   • Keep scored sections evidence-backed and high-confidence.

6. Run Realist Check on every surviving CRITICAL/MAJOR finding:

   • "If we shipped this as-is today, what is the realistic worst-case outcome?" (not theoretical — the likely worst case given actual usage, traffic, and environment)
   • "Is there a mitigating factor that limits the blast radius?" (e.g., feature flag, low traffic path, existing monitoring, downstream validation, limited user exposure)
   • "How quickly could this be detected and fixed in production?" Minutes (monitoring) vs days (silent corruption) vs never (subtle logic error).
   • "Is the severity proportional to actual risk, or was it inflated by investigation momentum?"

   SECURITY EXPLOITABILITY GATE (mandatory for all security-related findings):

   • "Who can trigger this? What privilege level is required to reach this code path?"
   • "Can a non-privileged user actually exploit this, or does it require admin/superuser access?"
   • "Does the existing access control model already make this moot?"

   Drupal privilege model awareness:

   • Drupal administrators can already execute arbitrary PHP, inject code via UI, and modify all site configuration. Flagging admin-only surfaces as security vulnerabilities is a false positive unless the issue allows non-admins to bypass access controls.
   • settings.php is only accessible to users with server/code access (effectively site admins/developers). Issues in settings.php are configuration concerns, not security vulnerabilities.
   • Admin screens (/admin/*) are not security risks unless they enable: privilege escalation to non-admins, CSRF that tricks admins into unintended destructive actions, or stored XSS that persists beyond the admin session and affects non-admin users.
   • Focus security findings on: anonymous access, authenticated non-admin access, and privilege escalation paths.

   If you cannot demonstrate a concrete exploit path accessible to non-admin/non-privileged users:

   • Tag the finding as [UNCONFIRMED] and move it to Open Questions
   • Add the note: "Security finding unconfirmed — no demonstrated exploit path for non-privileged users."
   • Do NOT leave unconfirmed security findings in scored sections

   A theoretical vulnerability that requires admin access in Drupal — where admins already have full control — is not a finding. It is manufactured alarmism that damages review credibility.

   Recalibration rules:

   • Minor inconvenience with easy rollback → downgrade CRITICAL to MAJOR
   • Mitigating factors substantially contain blast radius → downgrade CRITICAL to MAJOR or MAJOR to MINOR
   • Fast detection + straightforward fix → note context in the finding but keep it
   • Survives all four questions → correctly rated, keep it
   • NEVER downgrade findings involving data loss, security breach, or financial impact
   • Every downgrade MUST include a "Mitigated by: ..." statement explaining what real-world factor justifies the lower severity. No downgrade without an explicit mitigation rationale. Report any recalibrations in the Verdict Justification (e.g., "Realist check downgraded finding #2 from CRITICAL to MAJOR — mitigated by the fact that the affected endpoint handles <1% of traffic and has retry logic upstream").

7. Apply Drupal rubric from drupal-review-rubric.md.

8. Activate perspectives based on audience-activation-matrix.md.

9. Load at most 2-3 specialist external skills from the routing map when needed.

10. Return structured verdict with evidence.

Required Output Contract

Use this exact top-level structure:

• VERDICT: [REJECT | REVISE | ACCEPT-WITH-RESERVATIONS | ACCEPT]
• Overall Assessment
• Pre-commitment Predictions
• Critical Findings
• Major Findings
• Minor Findings
• What's Missing
• Ambiguity Risks (plan reviews only)
• Multi-Perspective Notes
• Verdict Justification
• Open Questions (unscored)

Rules:

• CRITICAL and MAJOR findings must include concrete evidence (file:line or backtick-quoted artifact reference).
• If a section has no items, write None.
• Keep speculative points in Open Questions only.
• In Verdict Justification, state whether escalation to adversarial review happened and why.

Perspectives

Always run:

• Security
• New-hire
• Ops

Context-driven (activate when triggered):

• Open Source Contributor
• Site Builder (Drupal admin UI)
• Content Editor/Marketer

Perspective notes must appear in Multi-Perspective Notes.

Drupal-Specific Must-Check List

Always check these before final verdict:

• Contrib-first decision quality: should this be upstream patch/work instead of custom code?
• Access and trust boundaries: routes, entity queries, permissions, token checks — but always verify the exploit path is reachable by non-admins. Admins already own the site; only flag admin-surface issues if they enable privilege escalation, CSRF, or stored XSS affecting non-admin users.
• Render safety: #markup, Twig raw output, sanitization path — focus on anonymous and authenticated non-admin paths. Admin-only XSS is low-priority unless it persists to non-admin contexts.
• Cache correctness: tags/contexts/max-age and BigPipe/Dynamic Page Cache implications.
• Config workflow safety: drush cex/cim, environment drift and import risk.
• Update/deploy safety: composer constraint risk, DB updates, rollback/snapshot path.
• Migration safety: source assumptions, idempotency, replay/rollback behavior.
• Operability: logging, failure handling, and blast radius.

Skill Loading Rules

• Match the review context against each skill's JTBD statement in the routing map before selecting. Load the skill whose situation clause most closely matches the artifact under review.
• Default: one core review skill + one specialist skill.
• Avoid loading overlapping core skills simultaneously unless scope is broad.
• Prefer higher-priority, active entries in external manifest.

Severity Calibration

• CRITICAL: exploit/security bypass/data-loss/deploy-blocking flaws.
• MAJOR: likely regressions or significant rework required.
• MINOR: non-blocking correctness/maintainability issues.
• Do not inflate severity for style-only points.

Stop Conditions

• If review scope is too broad, narrow by component/feature/path.
• If evidence cannot be found, move concern to Open Questions.