$ca-tribunal — deep codebase audit

SkillMonitoring & ops

Deep, rarely-convened whole-codebase audit — eleven specialist lenses, a resumable on-disk audit log, findings filed as GitHub issues on approval. Expensive; estimates cost and STOPs before running. Never a required gate.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the $ca-tribunal — deep codebase audit skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by arbiterforge/codearbiter in plugins/ca-pi/skills/ca-tribunal/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

The deepest, most expensive review codeArbiter offers, convened rarely and on demand. Routes to the tribunal skill. Eleven lenses judge the codebase; every finding persists to its own file (plus append-only triage/run logs) under .codearbiter/reports/<run-id>/, so an interrupted run resumes from disk. Never a required gate — critical/high are blocking-severity findings, not a pipeline halt.

Cost first — this lane routinely costs millions of tokens on a large repo. Phase 0 sizes the codebase, prints a token-cost band, recommends the highest-reasoning model, and STOPs for your acknowledgement before dispatching anything. Nothing runs unacknowledged.

Flow

Load and follow the tribunal skill (routines/tribunal/SKILL.md). In brief:

Phase 0 (STOP) — cost estimate, model recommendation, resume check. Phase 1 (BLOCK) — map the codebase; risk-rank and mark trust boundaries; record AI-authorship markers and iteration depth. Phase 2 (BLOCK) — dispatch tribunal-lens-reviewer once per active lens in priority waves (≤5 in flight); each dispatch writes one file per finding under its own findings/<lens>/ dir. Phase 3 (BLOCK) — triage per wave from disk: dedup, independent calibration, decision vocabulary. Phase 4 (BLOCK) — project the human-readable report from the logs. Phase 5 (BLOCK) — on explicit selection, file findings as GitHub issues; idempotent against the tracker. Phase 6 (STOP) — optional, opt-in KPI telemetry to the public codeArbiter repo.

Arguments

"scope-path" — focus the audit on a subtree (default: repository root). The full lens roster still runs; only the scope narrows.

--tag <label> — freeform run label recorded in telemetry (see references/telemetry.md).

Routes to

routines/tribunal/SKILL.md — dispatches tribunal-lens-reviewer once per active lens (and, on a large repo, the optional map-structure / map-deps mappers).

When NOT to use

  • A review of the current diff → $ca-review (gate-blocking, fast).
  • A lean periodic sweep → $ca-checkpoint (cheap, frequent; tribunal is its rare, deep counterpart).
  • An adversarial STRIDE pass on one sensitive feature → $ca-threat-model.
  • A governance packet for a window → $ca-audit.
  • Anything on a schedule or in a hot loop — tribunal is a rare, deliberate, expensive convening, not a routine gate.

Hard gate

MUST NOT dispatch any lens before you acknowledge the Phase 0 cost estimate. MUST NOT act as a required gate or block a merge/commit. MUST NOT file an issue or send telemetry without explicit authorization. Read-only on project code until the filing gate; findings file as GitHub issues, never the task board.

Signals

GitHub stars
144
Forks
7
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
ca-tribunal
Source
github.com/arbiterforge/codearbiter