Reviews

Three choices shape a review: who reviews, how their findings are combined, and what happens to those findings. Keep those choices separate when tuning the cost or interruption level.

/cadence:cad-config --review

This configures providers and detects their available models. The default reviewer is a fresh-context Claude subagent and needs no separate API key.

Providers and authorization

External providers run only when they are in the effective reviewer list and your user-global review.reviewers also names them. A repository list can narrow your authorized set, but cannot add a provider you haven’t authorized globally. A provider also needs a configured model and an available credential.

Provider model tiers and trigger effort affect external API reviewers. They don’t choose the Claude subagent’s model or effort; those come from its role settings. Decision review has its own provider settings and a separate Claude-subagent path.

Store model IDs and credential-file paths in configuration, never API keys. Credentials come from the environment first, then the provider env file. review.key_file changes that file’s path only from your user-global configuration.

What a gate does

Gate	Consequence
`off`	The trigger runs no review.
`advisory`	Report findings and continue.
`deferred`	Continue the work; unresolved queued reviews stop landing.
`blocking`	Stop on surviving blocker or high findings. An unavailable review cannot silently pass.
`adjudicated`	Evaluate findings against the cited code and present the surviving findings for your triage.

review.mode controls how reviewers combine; a gate set to adjudicated requires adjudication regardless of the mode.

Risk surfaces

Use /cadence:cad-config --surfaces to revisit which risk surfaces the project contains. The plan-time risk floor can raise the default plan review to blocking and turn on deep verification. The resolver preserves a valid explicitly configured plan gate, including an explicitly configured advisory value. It doesn’t change role models or effort.

Waiving a surface’s routing floor withholds those plan-time effects for that surface. It doesn’t disable review of a matching actual diff. Keep the waiver distinct from changing which surfaces the detector watches.

Settings

`review.mode`

Default: "adjudicated" · Type: enum · Scope: repository or user-global.

Allowed values: "single", "panel", "adjudicated".

single uses the first available reviewer. panel combines and deduplicates findings. adjudicated runs reviewers independently, then evaluates their findings against the cited code before merging survivors.

`review.reviewers`

Default: ["claude-subagent"] · Type: list of allowed values · Scope: repository or user-global.

Allowed items: "claude-subagent", "openai", "gemini", "deepseek".

Reviewer backends to request. Lists replace across layers. External providers also need explicit user-global authorization, a model and a credential; the repository alone cannot enable them.

`review.key_file`

Default: null · Type: string or null · Scope: user-global only.

Override the provider credential env-file path, never the key itself. null uses providers.env under the Cadence XDG config directory, normally ~/.config/cadence/providers.env. Environment credentials take precedence.

`review.request_timeout_ms`

Default: 540000 · Type: integer · Scope: repository or user-global.

Range: 1–600000.

Timeout in milliseconds for an external review-provider HTTPS request. It does not set a Claude-subagent execution timeout.

`review.max_prompt_tokens`

Default: 120000 · Type: integer · Scope: repository or user-global.

Range: 1 or greater.

Estimated token ceiling for external review and consult payloads, using characters divided by four. An over-cap request is refused before transmission. It does not limit the Claude subagent.