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/review --batch: work a queue faster, without a faster gate

· 2 min read
Carefree Investments LLC
Anchor maintainers

/review has always reviewed exactly one plan per invocation — deliberately. A backlog of several review-needed/ plans still meant re-typing /review between each one. --batch [N] removes that friction without touching the one thing that actually matters: every plan still gets its own critic pass and its own required sign-off.

What doesn't change​

Each item in a batch runs the exact same pipeline a solo /review runs: checkout, evidence, a fresh-context AI critic with no memory of sibling items, present, survey, follow-ups, merge, lane move. The survey is never skipped and never inferred from earlier items — "the last two were Approve" is not a reason to stop asking. Promotion review (the empty-queue dev → main gate) is untouched; --batch never applies there.

What's new​

/review --batch          # up to 3 top-priority plans
/review --batch 5        # explicit cap

Before the first survey question, /review shows the whole batch — what's in, and what got excluded and why. A plan is excluded (falls back to single-item review) when it:

  • carries a ## Handoff hold note,
  • has a large diff (more than 8 files, or ±300 lines net), or
  • shares a touched path with another candidate in the same batch — the same overlap rule /work --batch's batch_dispatch.py applies for parallel execution, restated in prose here so the check stands on its own.

--batch refuses to combine with --skip-ai — skipping the fresh-context critic across several plans at once is exactly the rubber-stamp risk this mode exists to avoid.

Update: batch is now the default​

Bare /review now opens a batch whenever two or more plans are eligible — the opt-in flag above became the default, as a trial. Nothing about the gate moved: each plan still gets its own critic and its own required survey. To go back to one at a time, pass /review --no-batch for a run, or set it for good with anchor --set-review-batch off (project) or ./config.sh --review-batch off (machine); anchor --show-review-batch prints the effective setting and its source. A named slug, --promote and --skip-ai still run single-item with no error.