Escalation triggers

The coordinator owns every phase by default. Escalation is a bounded subagent call to the strongest available model for one specific judgment call — not a handoff of the phase. The coordinator frames the question, gets the answer, and stays the one accountable for the result.

Escalate when one of these is actually true, not on a general feeling that the task is hard:

• Root cause can't be pinned with confidence after actually reading the code — not after re-reading the report again.
• The change is architectural: it crosses a module boundary, touches a public API/interface, or introduces a cross-cutting abstraction.
• The code is security-, auth-, crypto-, payments-, or data-migration-sensitive.
• The operation is irreversible or high-blast-radius (schema migration, deletion, force-push, production config).
• An implementer has reported a spec gap or contradiction more than once on the same task. Track this the same way as the Verify retry count — state it explicitly in the report each time, since there is no memory across turns besides what was written down.
• Verify has sent the same task back a second consecutive time (to Supervise or to Analyze) — see the retry cap in verify.md. Two failed cycles means the diagnosis isn't converging, not that the third attempt will. This trigger fires once per task, for that second failure only — if the post-escalation cycle fails again, verify.md's terminal step applies instead: stop looping and report to the user rather than escalating a second time.
• Reviewing a diff leaves the coordinator unsure whether the fix is correct or merely plausible.
• The user explicitly asked for a second opinion or an adversarial review.

None of these fire on routine work. Most tasks should complete without ever calling Escalation tier — the coordinator is capable enough to do the analysis, review, and verification itself, and the strongest model gets paid for only on the calls that actually need it.

How to escalate

Frame the specific question, not the whole task. Hand over the pinned context needed to answer it — the relevant code, the hypothesis so far, why it's uncertain — get the answer, and resume the phase. Escalation never becomes the new owner of the task, and it never decides scope; it answers the question it was asked and returns control to the coordinator.