I'll help with this, but I need to flag something important about the process first.

## The Iron Law applies here

This is an **edit to existing guidance**, which my writing-skills training treats exactly like editing a skill:

> **This applies to NEW skills AND EDITS to existing skills.**
> Edit skill without testing? Same violation.

That means I can't responsibly hand you finished template text as if it's deploy-ready. I haven't watched the failure happen under controlled conditions, so I don't yet know whether my proposed text addresses the *actual* reasons reports bury verdicts. But I can give you a candidate edit AND the RED-phase plan that must run before it goes live. The verification plan isn't an afterthought here — it's what determines whether the text below survives.

So treat part (1) as a **hypothesis to test**, not a final answer.

---

## (1) Candidate text to add to the reviewer prompt template

This goes near the top of the template's output-format section:

```markdown
## Output Format (REQUIRED)

Your report MUST begin with the verdict block below, before any
explanation. Controllers read the verdict block and stop. Anything
they need to act on must be inside it.

### Verdict Block — emit this FIRST, always

VERDICT: PASS | FAIL | NEEDS-CHANGES
BLOCKING ISSUES: <numbered list, or "none">
REQUIRED ACTIONS: <numbered list, or "none">

### After the verdict block

Supporting detail goes here. Do NOT narrate your process.

Forbidden in this report:
- Recounting what you did ("First I read the diff, then I checked...")
- Ordering findings by the sequence you discovered them
- Putting any blocking issue only in the prose and not in the
  verdict block

If you catch yourself writing "First I" or "Then I" or "Next I",
delete the sentence. The controller does not need your process;
they need your conclusion. State the finding, not the journey to it.
```

**Why I'm not confident in this yet:** I'm guessing the failure is "agents narrate by reflex." But the real cause might be something else — e.g., the template asks questions in process order, or it rewards thoroughness in a way that incentivizes showing work. If so, this text treats a symptom. The baseline test below will tell us.

---

## (2) Verification plan (must run BEFORE deploying)

### RED — reproduce the failure without my edit

1. Take the **current, unedited** template.
2. Run 3–5 realistic review tasks through it (subagents): a clean diff, a diff with one blocking bug, a diff with several mixed issues, a borderline case.
3. Record verbatim: Where does the verdict appear? How far down? Is any blocking issue *only* in the narration? Capture the exact narration phrasings agents use.
4. **This is the test failing.** If reports already lead with verdicts, there's nothing to fix and I stop.

### GREEN — confirm my edit fixes the *observed* failure

5. Add the candidate text. Re-run the **same** tasks.
6. Check: verdict block first every time? Every blocking issue present in the block, not just prose? Narration gone?

### REFACTOR — close loopholes

7. Look for new evasions, e.g. agent emits the block but then re-narrates ("As shown above, first I..."), or smuggles a blocking issue into supporting detail. Add explicit counters and re-test until clean.
8. Watch for over-correction: does the forbidden-narration rule cause agents to drop genuinely useful evidence (e.g. *how* they reproduced a bug)? If so, the rule needs to distinguish "process narration" from "reproduction steps a controller needs." Re-test.

### Adjust the text based on what RED shows

9. If baseline reveals the cause is template question-ordering rather than reflexive narration, I revise the candidate text accordingly — possibly reordering the template's prompts instead of (or in addition to) adding the format rule.

**Bottom line:** the text in (1) is provisional. The plan in (2) is what makes it safe to ship. If you want, I can write the actual baseline scenario prompts so we can run the RED phase before committing anything.