Reading the diff vs. reading the ticket: the scope-drift problem

Code review is good at one thing: judging whether the code in front of the reviewer is correct. It's much worse at a different question — did this change actually do what the ticket asked for?

Review checks the code, not the intent

Reviewers rarely open the ticket side-by-side with the diff. So a PR can be clean, well-tested, and approved — while quietly skipping an acceptance criterion, or adding scope the ticket never mentioned. That gap between intent and code is scope drift, and it's easy to miss precisely because the code looks fine.

An on-demand second read

syncTrace adds a second read on demand: comment @syncTrace on a PR or its Linear issue, and it compares the full diff to the ticket — flagging what's covered, what was added beyond spec, what's not yet addressed, and what to confirm. It's the ticket-vs-code check that review usually skips.