Round Budgets End Recursion

Fresh review after repair is necessary, and it can recurse forever. Each repair changes the artifact; each new reviewer pass can notice something else. “Stop when the reviewer says nothing” gives an external model unlimited control over schedule and can reward increasingly trivial findings.

A round budget makes termination part of the contract. It states how many independent cycles the task can afford before the owner must choose: land with every blocker dispositioned, widen the budget explicitly, or stop and rescope. The budget does not make unresolved blockers expire.

Risk can shape the budget. A small reversible note may need one round; a broad migration may need several. The important property is precommitment and visible amendment. Increasing the budget after a substantive new defect is reasonable when the record says why.

At the final round, produce reconciliation: blockers raised, repaired, stetted, observations carried, checks rerun, and residual risk. This closes review by decision rather than by reviewer exhaustion.

A Stop Rule With Teeth

Declare the budget at the plan gate or pipeline row. Track completed rounds and refuse to start another automatically once it is spent. The next action must be an explicit owner decision.

A clean final round is welcome but not the only legitimate ending. A fully evidenced reconciliation with valid stets can close honestly; an unavailable reviewer or undispositioned blocker cannot.

A round budget turns review into a bounded control loop. Each pass must consume accepted blockers and produce new evidence; repeated taste debates or unchanged claims do not earn infinite retries. When the budget ends, expose the unresolved decision to the human owner instead of hiding it in recursion.

Code

Require an explicit decision when the round budget is spent·python

def next_review(completed: int, budget: int, unresolved: int) -> str:
    if completed < budget:
        return "run-review"
    if unresolved:
        return "owner-decision-required"
    return "reconcile-and-land"

assert next_review(2, 2, 1) == "owner-decision-required"
assert next_review(2, 2, 0) == "reconcile-and-land"

Round Budgets End Recursion