[geoHeil]

Reviewers now have one set of review steps with explicit evidence and exit criteria. It covers the exact PR commit, prior findings, source content, document-tree ownership and order, exports, meaningful regression tests, severity, and validation limits. The same steps are available to human and agent reviewers.

The guidance uses 50 recent PRs with submitted reviews by users listed in MAINTAINERS.md. The sample contains 61 reviews and runs from #4551 to #4411, ordered by PR creation date. The research informed the review steps. The PR keeps that research history here; shipped guidance contains only the durable review principles. Short LGTM reviews show acceptance; they do not prove a specific rule was checked.

Sutura supplied the small task-router and skill-discovery pattern. A Python check rejects missing skill files, unrouted contributor skills, and incorrect Codex/Claude links. It runs through existing hooks and CI. Skill-only paths now trigger CI, including the lint hook. The check proves routing and link integrity; reviewers still assess behavior and test quality. Package usage skills remain separate.

Validation: 7 route tests and 8 existing PR fast-check tests pass. make validate, the route check, Ruff, scoped ty, and workflow path-selection checks pass. Full make check stops at the existing 1000-line check for 11 unchanged files. Its earlier Ruff, ty, Tach, and module-coverage steps pass. Dprint and lock checks pass separately. No conversion outputs changed.

Depends on #4552. #4554 adds the ty upgrade above this PR.

[geoHeil]

Stack Links

This PR is part of a local stacked series:

• main
  • PR docs(agents): require simplified technical English #4552
    • PR chore(review): add evidence-based review steps and skill route gate #4553 👈
      • PR chore(types): mark method overrides explicitly #4556
        • PR fix(backends): make parsed data and model contracts explicit #4557
          • PR fix(types): align core Python contracts with ty #4558
            • PR chore(deps): upgrade ty to 0.0.84 #4554

This comment was autogenerated by stax

[github-actions]

✅ DCO Check Passed

Thanks @geoHeil, all your commits are properly signed off. 🎉

[mergify]

Merge Protections

🟢 Merge protection satisfied — ready to merge.

Show 1 satisfied protection

🟢 Enforce conventional commit

Make sure that we follow https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

• title ~= ^(fix|feat|docs|style|refactor|perf|test|build|ci|chore|revert)(?:\(.+\))?(!)?:

[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 78.47751% with 311 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
docling/backend/html_backend.py	66.96%	32 Missing and 5 partials ⚠️
...odels/vlm_pipeline_models/hf_transformers_model.py	14.81%	23 Missing ⚠️
.../models/inference_engines/common/kserve_v2_grpc.py	0.00%	21 Missing ⚠️
docling/models/vlm_pipeline_models/mlx_model.py	40.74%	12 Missing and 4 partials ⚠️
docling/backend/msexcel_backend.py	51.72%	9 Missing and 5 partials ⚠️
docling/cli/main.py	62.16%	12 Missing and 2 partials ⚠️
docling/backend/opendocument_backend.py	76.00%	6 Missing and 6 partials ⚠️
docling/backend/latex/handlers/macros.py	15.38%	11 Missing ⚠️
.../models/extraction/nuextract_transformers_model.py	0.00%	10 Missing ⚠️
docling/backend/iwork_backend.py	59.09%	6 Missing and 3 partials ⚠️
... and 47 more

📢 Thoughts on this report? Let us know!

[geoHeil]

Superseded by #4580. This PR carried downstream stack commits and showed 176 files. #4580 contains only the review guardrails on current main.