Self-review summary:

• Scope: benchmark helper/runtime guard only; no scoring, task semantics, leaderboard, permission, or job-launch changes.
• Behavior: fail fast when a requested SkillsBench task is absent from canonical tasks before spending a full runner arm; preserve only public-safe task-source preflight evidence in compact output and ledger.
• Validation passed locally:
  • python3 -m py_compile scripts/skillsbench_automation_loop.py loopx/benchmark_adapters/skillsbench.py loopx/benchmark_ledger.py loopx/status.py examples/skillsbench-task-source-preflight-smoke.py
  • python3 examples/skillsbench-task-source-preflight-smoke.py
  • git diff --check
  • loopx check on the five changed paths
• Merge status: normal merge is blocked by branch policy; auto-merge is disabled for this repository.

Findings: none from this review pass.

Open questions / assumptions: I treated this as a benchmark helper/runtime preflight guard. It fails fast before runner spend when a requested SkillsBench id is present only in the sanity source and absent from canonical tasks/; I did not see scoring, task semantics, leaderboard, submission, or raw-evidence boundary changes.

Validation performed:

• python3 examples/skillsbench-task-source-preflight-smoke.py passed on the PR head.

Merge decision: hold for normal reviewer/branch-protection flow; no blocker found in the diff plus focused preflight smoke.