tighten

Tighten a document

This skill takes a document, runs it through Deirdre (the editor sub-agent, a critic built on Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing), and applies the edits — surgical and substantive alike — with no approval step. If the user wants a review instead of a rewrite, that's critique, not this.

The prime directive: preserve all original meaning. Tighten the words, not the message. Deirdre only critiques; she refuses to rewrite. So the flow is: she finds what's fat, weak, or repetitive; you (the agent running this skill) make the edits, carefully, as exact find-and-replace — then apply them without stopping to ask.

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. Everything below is specific to tighten's no-approval apply step.

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. Triage. Merge Pass 1 + Pass 2 findings, dedupe overlaps, and sort each into surgical or substantive per the shared method file.
5. Apply everything. Make every surgical and substantive edit via exact find-and-replace. The one exception: an edit that flattens emotional meaning or kills a deliberate cadence (see "protect the emotional and rhythmic lines" in the shared method file) — skip that one and note it in the report instead of applying it. Nothing else waits for approval; this skill never asks, it applies.
6. Bump updated:. For any edited file that has note frontmatter, set updated: to today (MM-DD-YYYY). Skip files without frontmatter.
7. Report. Present findings per Reporting below. There's nothing left to approve — this is a summary of what changed, not a request for sign-off.

Reporting

• Open with one line. "N safe tightenings, M structural changes applied." That's the whole run at a glance.
• Collapse the surgical. Don't show every before→after. Give the count and the rewritten final paragraphs, so the user eyeballs the clean result instead of diffing each word.
• Spotlight the substantive. These already happened, but they're the ones worth a second look — number each, show before→after, and say why it was safe to apply.
• Call out anything skipped. If an edit was held back for flattening emotion or killing a cadence, name it and say why, so the user knows it wasn't missed, it was a judgment call.

Guardrails

Preserves all original meaning, with one named exception path (skip, don't apply, edits that flatten emotion or kill a deliberate cadence). Editing local markdown is automatic in this project — this skill always applies its edits, both surgical and substantive, with no approval step and no asking first. Never sends, posts, or touches anything outside the local file(s) it's given.