| name | critic |
| description | Adversarial self-review gate that re-reads a literature review, comparison, or idea list before it's presented as final, hunting for overclaiming, cherry-picking, and gaps. |
critic — adversarial self-review
Process
- Re-read the output as a skeptic, not as its author. Assume the first draft has a bias toward telling a clean story and look for where that bias distorted the content.
- Hunt for overclaimed conclusions. Does the output state something more strongly than the underlying papers support?
- Hunt for cherry-picking. Does the set of papers/results chosen support a tidy narrative while omitting contradicting or complicating work that turned up during search?
- Hunt for coverage gaps. In a fast-moving subfield, is there recent work (last few months) that should have surfaced in literature_review but didn't get checked?
- Hunt for ideation blind spots. Do any proposed ideas ignore an existing solution that was already found in the same session's literature review?
- Report findings before finalizing. Surface anything found to the user rather than silently fixing and hiding the fact a problem existed — the user should know what was caught and corrected.
Anti-Rationalization
- "The draft looks solid" — that's exactly the bias this skill exists to catch; a self-satisfied first read is not a critical read.
- "Cherry-picking wasn't intentional" — intent doesn't matter for the output's accuracy; check the actual paper set regardless of intent.
- "No time for another pass" — this is the last gate before the user sees the output; skipping it means overclaims ship uncorrected.
Evidence
A critic pass is complete when: overclaim check, cherry-pick check, and coverage-gap check have each been explicitly performed and their outcome (found issues or none) is reported.
Red Flags
- Skipping straight to "looks good" without checking each of the four hunt categories
- Finding an issue and fixing it silently without telling the user what was wrong
- Never finding any issues across many consecutive reviews (suggests the check isn't actually adversarial)