review-agent-governance — Setup

Gate AI agent review actions (PR reviews, comments, merges, CI edits) behind explicit human approval. Every attempt, approved or denied, produces an Ed25519-signed receipt.

When to use this plugin

Install it in projects where a Claude Code agent:

• Reviews, comments on, or merges pull requests (gh pr review , gh pr merge )

• Triages issues (gh issue comment , gh issue close )

• Publishes releases (gh release create )

• Modifies CI configuration (.github/workflows/ , .gitlab-ci.yml )

• Pushes to protected branches (main , master , release , production )

• Posts to external notification surfaces (Slack webhooks, Discord)

If the agent is only doing local file edits and running tests, this plugin is overkill. Use protect-mcp for general tool-call policy enforcement and skip this one.

One-time setup

1. Install the plugin

claude plugin install wshobson/agents/review-agent-governance

2. Copy the default policy to your project

cp .claude/plugins/review-agent-governance/policies/review-agent-governance.cedar
./review-governance.cedar

You can edit this file to match your project's specific rules. See ../agents/review-policy-author.md for guidance on authoring review policies.

3. Create a receipts directory and sign key

mkdir -p ./review-receipts echo "./review-receipts/" >> .gitignore echo "./review-governance.key" >> .gitignore echo "./.review-approved" >> .gitignore

The first invocation of protect-mcp sign will create the key. Commit the public key from the first receipt so auditors can verify later.

Per-session workflow

The Cedar policy denies review-surface actions unconditionally. To approve a specific action, open an approval window before it and close it after.

Flag file (simplest)

Before the action you want to approve

touch ./.review-approved

Let Claude Code run the review / comment / merge

Immediately after

rm ./.review-approved

Slash command (from within Claude Code)

/approve-review "Reviewing PR #123 authored by contributor X"

This creates ./.review-approved with the given reason embedded as a note, and writes a human-approved receipt to the chain. A follow-up rm is still needed to close the window.

Dry-run everything (force full policy evaluation)

If you want every tool call to go through Cedar with no approval bypass:

export REVIEW_APPROVAL_FLAG=./.never-approve

Any tool call matching a forbid rule will be denied; approved windows have no effect. Useful for CI or for a locked-down audit run.

Verifying the chain

List all receipts:

ls -la ./review-receipts/

Verify the entire chain offline:

npx @veritasacta/verify ./review-receipts/*.json

Exit 0 means every receipt is authentic and the chain is intact. Exit 1 means one receipt has been tampered with. Exit 2 means a receipt is malformed.

Look at recent denials:

/list-pending

Within Claude Code this slash command walks the receipt chain and prints any recent decision: deny entries with the tool name, command pattern, and timestamp.

Example: approving a PR review

1. Human reviews the agent's proposed comment

$ /list-pending Recent denials:

• 2026-04-17T14:23:01Z Bash "gh pr review 42 --approve --body 'LGTM'"
• 2026-04-17T14:23:02Z Bash "gh pr comment 42 --body 'Looking good'"

2. Human decides the first one is appropriate, approves it

$ /approve-review "Approving LGTM on PR 42 after visual inspection" ./.review-approved created

3. Agent retries the action; this time it succeeds

$ agent: gh pr review 42 --approve --body "LGTM" [receipt: rec_XXX, decision=allow, reason=human_approved]

4. Human closes the window

$ rm ./.review-approved

Every step is in the receipt chain. The chain is offline-verifiable for regulators, counterparties, or downstream auditors who want to confirm that no review action bypassed the human gate.

Composing with protect-mcp

If both plugins are installed, run them side by side:

{ "hooks": { "PreToolUse": [ { "matcher": ".", "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "npx protect-mcp@0.5.5 evaluate --policy ./protect.cedar --tool "$TOOL_NAME" --input "$TOOL_INPUT" --fail-on-missing-policy false" } ] }, { "matcher": ".", "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "if [ -f ./.review-approved ]; then exit 0; fi; npx protect-mcp@0.5.5 evaluate --policy ./review-governance.cedar --tool "$TOOL_NAME" --input "$TOOL_INPUT" --fail-on-missing-policy false" } ] } ] } }

Both hooks must pass for the tool call to proceed. Cedar deny in either policy blocks it.

Standards

• Ed25519 — RFC 8032 (digital signatures)

• JCS — RFC 8785 (deterministic JSON canonicalization)

• Cedar — AWS's open authorization policy language

• IETF draft — draft-farley-acta-signed-receipts