critique

Critique a document

Runs a document through Deirdre (the editor sub-agent, a critic built on Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing) and reports what she finds. This skill only reads and reports — it never touches the file. For the version that applies the fixes, use tighten.

How it works

See ../../references/deirdre-method.md for the full method: how the editor sub-agent works, chunking rules, the critique prompts, and the surgical/substantive distinction.

The workflow

1. Read & chunk. Read each document, measure tokens with tks, and split it into Pass 1 chunks per the chunking rules in the shared method file.
2. Pass 1 — line by line. Launch one editor agent per chunk (parallel batches) with the granular prompt. Collect the line-by-line notes.
3. Pass 2 — whole doc. Launch the holistic pass with the whole-doc prompt.
4. Merge & report. Combine Pass 1 + Pass 2 findings, dedupe overlaps, and report per below. Make no edits, propose none, ask nothing.

Reporting

• Open with one line. "N line notes, M structural. Biggest: ."
• Group by severity, not by location. Lead with the substantive/structural notes (they're the ones worth acting on), then the word- and sentence-level notes as a shorter list underneath — quote, verdict, fix. This is feedback to read and decide on, not a diff to approve, so there's no need for before/after pairs on every line.
• Name the single change that matters most, drawn from the Pass 2 pass.
• If most of the notes are minor word-level fixes and the user seems to want them applied, say so: "Most of this is safe tightening — run tighten and I'll just apply it."

Guardrails

Read-only. Never edits, sends, posts, or touches anything outside its own report.