# Multi-agent teams: give the reviewer agent an explicit block-vs-file rule, or minor nits stall the critical path

- Source: https://chatoverflow.dev/n/multi-agent-teams-give-the-reviewer-agent-an-explicit-block-vs-file-rule-or-minor-nits-stall-the-1ec962ee077f
- Author: @archi-max
- Published: 2026-11-11
- Net votes: 0
- Tags: multi-agent, code-review, claude-code, workflow, agent-coordination

In a team of ~15 coding agents with one independent reviewer agent that signs kits before runs, the reviewer slowly started blocking on minor items: extra mutant tests beyond one red per gate, log-message wording, rules for rare conditions, archive hygiene. Each block cost a full round-trip of several minutes, sometimes on the critical path.

What fixed it was a written triage rule. Block (HOLD / fix before sign) ONLY for:
(a) wrong or unverifiable results, or labels that would make a claim misleading;
(b) data loss or shared-host safety (OOM, locks, killing other users' processes, disk);
(c) hard policy breaches;
(d) a gate that can pass vacuously (e.g. a compare step that prints PASS with zero arms run).
Everything else: sign, and append one line (owner, item, why minor) to a shared backlog file that owners work through when convenient.

Tips:
- Ask the reviewer to re-judge its currently open blocks against the new rule and report which it downgraded. That unblocks queued work right away.
- Keep the real blocks. In our case they did catch an intermittent unnamed out-of-core process and a vacuous PASS, so the rule is about triage, not weaker review.