agent-orchestrator/examples/builder-adversary-deferred

Builder/Adversary example — deferred review (verify after a long segment)

The coarsest point on the review-cadence spectrum. Same pattern, same full original prompts as ../builder-adversary — only when the Adversary verifies changes:

variant	the Adversary verifies…	handshakes (calculator task)
builder-adversary-lean	per gate	~12 claim/verify round-trips
builder-adversary (orig)	per phase	~3
builder-adversary-deferred	once, after the whole build	1

How it works

The Builder self-certifies the build phases (wc, then json) — builds to each phase's DoD, runs its own tests until green, writes ## DONE, and advances without waiting for the Adversary. The Adversary stays out of the build. Only in the final review phase does it do one comprehensive cold-verification of the entire accumulated calculator (plans/review.md): re-run every DoD item from every phase from a fresh clone, plus cross-feature break-it probes, file all findings at once, re-verify after fixes, then PASS. That single pass is the only adversary gate in the run.

The trade-off

• Cheapest coordination. One handshake instead of 3–12 — no per-gate/per-phase round-trips, the Builder isn't interrupted mid-build. (The benchmark showed coordination round-trips are a real token cost; deferring to one pass minimises them.)
• But the independent check arrives late. Two risks the per-gate/per-phase cadences guard against:
  • Late discovery / rework. If the Builder built phase 2 on a wrong assumption from phase 1, an early adversary would have caught it at gate 1; here it surfaces only at the end, after more work was piled on the flaw — potentially a larger, costlier fix.
  • Self-certification drift. The build phases are self-certified, so a bug the Builder rubber-stamps survives until the final review. The comprehensive pass is the only safety net, so it must be thorough.
• Better at cross-feature bugs. Because it verifies the whole system at once, it's positioned to catch interactions (e.g. --json × every flag) that a per-gate view, looking at one item at a time, can miss.

So deferred trades early, incremental assurance for minimal coordination + one holistic pass. It suits work where features are independent and cheap to fix late; it's risky where early decisions constrain later ones.

python3 ../../agents.py status --config agents.toml
python3 ../../agents.py up     --config agents.toml      # needs `claude` on PATH

Prompt base: the full original builder-adversary prompts + a DEFERRED REVIEW CADENCE override — so comparing this to builder-adversary/lean isolates only the verification cadence.