rootnode-critic-gatelisted

# Critic Gate > **Calibration:** Tier 2 (Sonnet-graceful) - designed and tested against Opus 5 + Sonnet 5 dual-primary. Runs correctly on Sonnet 4.6 (legacy-graceful) with slightly less depth on multi-dimensional analysis; on Haiku 4.5 with extended thinking; fallback-graceful on Opus 4.8. Effort default is `high` on Opus 5 and Sonnet 5; step down to `medium` for cost-sensitive runs where evals show quality holds. See repository README for model compatibility. Independent re-derivation of proposed changes during autonomous execution. Returns a structured verdict before any change lands. The load-bearing safety mechanism for autonomous engine evolution — without it, multi-cycle drift is guaranteed. The premise: **the agent that proposes a change cannot be the agent that approves it.** When Claude Code is iterating on an engine, every proposed change has an author who has reasoned themselves into the change's necessity. That author's judgment is exactly what the change is grounded in — making them an unreliable evaluator of the change's safety. The critic gate runs on a fresh evaluator with no commitment to the change, applying narrow, named checks against the work's invariants. This Skill is the rootnode runtime layer's analog to a "Critic Agent" role — an independent re-derivation pass over proposed changes. Generalized for portability: the authority matrix is supplied as input, not baked in. ## Important **The critic does not re-derive the diagnosis.** It does not veri