Pre-checks Shipped
The target repo's own linters and typecheckers run before any model does, and their diagnostics are folded in as known ground.
Anything a linter, typechecker or compiler would catch is the single largest category of AI-review noise. So the deterministic tools run first, off the event loop, and their output is handed to the workers as known ground. A specialist that re-reports a type error the typechecker already printed is adding nothing, and now it can see that.
Version hygiene rides along
One deterministic sub-check runs regardless of what your repo configures: whether a document whose frontmatter carries a version was edited without that version being touched. It is small, it is mechanical, and it is exactly the kind of thing a model should never be spending a dispatch on.
Opt-in per objective
Pre-checks are declared by the objective and need a real repository to run against, so a review of a raw diff with no checkout simply skips them rather than failing.