Verify review quote grounding

Type: kb/types/instruction.md

Target: $ARGUMENTS — the review note path (e.g. kb/agent-memory-systems/reviews/a-mem.md) and the source checkout directory it was written against.

Confirm every quote-anchored citation in a code-grounded review quotes its source verbatim. A quote-anchored citation is a blockquote whose final line is a --- attribution naming a source location, as defined in the agent-memory-system-review type spec's Citations section.

When to use

  • Right after writing or updating a review, while the source checkout still exists. The reviewed source is not retained in the KB, so this cannot be run later from the KB alone.
  • Before committing a review whose load-bearing claims use quote-anchored citations.

Skip when the review uses no quote-anchored citations (no blockquotes with --- attribution lines). There is nothing to resolve.

Inputs

  • note_path — the review note.
  • source_dir — the checkout the review was written against. Verify it is readable (test -d "$source_dir"). If it is missing, stop and report — resolution is impossible without it; do not pass the review as verified.
  • reviewed_revision — the commit the review pins (from the review's **Reviewed revision:** line). Used to report mismatches, not to re-checkout.

Procedure

  1. Extract citations. From note_path, collect each quote-anchored citation as a pair: the quote (the blockquote body, all lines above the --- attribution line, with the leading > markers removed) and the attribution (the source path or blob URL, and the commit if present).

  2. Resolve the source path. For each citation, map the attribution to a file under source_dir:

  3. A code-span path (`src/memory/store.py`) → source_dir/src/memory/store.py.

  4. A blob URL → the path component after /blob/<commit>/. If the file does not exist under source_dir, record a FAIL (missing source file) and continue.

  5. Resolve the quote. Read the file and check the quote appears in it, comparing with whitespace normalized — collapse runs of whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) to a single space and trim ends, on both the quote and the file text, before searching. Exact-substring after that normalization counts as resolved.

  6. Resolves → PASS.

  7. Does not resolve → FAIL (quote not found in source). Report the quote (truncated) and the file.

  8. Check the pinned commit (if present in the attribution). If the attribution names a commit, confirm it matches the review's reviewed_revision. A mismatch is a WARN (citation commit differs from reviewed revision), not a FAIL — the quote may still resolve, but the pin is inconsistent.

  9. Report. List each citation with its verdict. If any citation FAILs, the review is not verified — fix the quote (copy the source verbatim) or the path, then re-run. Resolution failures must be fixed before commit; a paraphrased blockquote is the common cause.

Scope

  • This checks structural grounding only — that the quoted text exists in the source. It does not check whether the quote supports the claim; that is semantic faithfulness, covered by the semantic/grounding-alignment review gate.
  • This does not validate ordinary document-level citations (a bare file path with no blockquote). Those are not quote-anchored and have nothing to resolve.