CI proves the build. CD proves the ship. Neither proves the code is any good — and your agent writes faster than anyone reviews. This playbook is the third pillar: gate every push on the health of the code, not just its behavior.
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The CI-shaped stage that answers one deterministic question on every push: is this commit healthier or sicker than the baseline? Four properties make it a gate and not a dashboard.
Findings that return to the agent that wrote them — structured, actionable context that seeds the next run, instead of a wall of alerts a human is supposed to triage.
Decisions remembered across runs, so the gate never re-litigates a finding the team already dismissed — and quality can only move one direction.
Where CQ deployments actually break: gates trained to be ignored, feedback nobody consumes, scores that drift backward.
Where your team stands today, and a reasonable path from scanner to standing gate — with the agent budget and blast radius accounted for.
The pattern predates any one tool — you can wire it from the scanners and CI primitives you already run. The closing section shows one toolchain that ships all three stages as a single pipeline step; the playbook is yours either way.
Written for engineers and tech leads running Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any agent that ships real diffs. A human degraded a codebase slowly enough that an annual architecture review caught it — an agent degrades it on a Tuesday afternoon. The only review cadence that keeps up is the one that runs on push.
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