review

name	review
description	Run an independent review of a committee deliberation transcript. Evaluates against the five core rubrics, cites specific transcript passages, and produces actionable feedback. Use '/review' after a committee run or with a pasted transcript; use '/review --situation <path>' to review that situation's deliberation and write transcript_review to 04-evaluation-1.md (or 06-evaluation-2.md, 08-evaluation-3.md when the feedback loop has run).
license	MIT
compatibility	["codex","claude-code","opencode"]
metadata	{"author":"cyberneutics","version":"0.1.0","tags":["deliberation"],"tested-tools":["claude-code"]}

Committee Review Skill

Perform an independent evaluation of a committee deliberation transcript, treating it as a found document and scoring it against the five core rubrics from the Cyberneutics evaluation framework.

Why this exists

The same model instance that generated a committee deliberation is inherently biased toward finding it convincing. It produced text that coheres locally and will interpret that local coherence as quality. This skill breaks the hermeneutic circle by imposing the discipline of external evaluation: treat the transcript as if you've never seen it, evaluate only what's on the page, and score against explicit rubrics.

Perfect independence is impossible within a single conversation. This skill compensates by:

• Evaluating the transcript strictly as a found document
• Ignoring all context about how/why it was generated
• Requiring every score to cite specific transcript passages
• Flagging what's missing, not just what's present
• Making its own reasoning fully transparent and challengeable

When to use

• User types /review (evaluates the most recent committee deliberation in the conversation)
• User types /review and pastes or attaches a transcript
• User types /review --situation <path> or "review the last deliberation record" — read transcript from <situation-dir>/deliberations/, write transcript review into the appropriate evaluation file (04-evaluation-1.md for first review, then 06-evaluation-2.md, 08-evaluation-3.md when remediation has run)
• User asks to "review the deliberation" or "evaluate the committee output"
• After any /committee run, suggest: "Want me to run /review on this?"

What the skill does

1. Locates the transcript: Either from the most recent committee deliberation in the conversation, or from user-provided text
2. Identifies the charter: Extracts the problem statement / decision being deliberated (this is needed to evaluate whether the deliberation was fit for purpose)
3. Scores against five rubrics (0-3 each) with specific transcript citations
4. Assesses structural quality beyond the rubrics
5. Produces actionable feedback — what would raise each score
6. Delivers a verdict — trustworthiness as decision input

The five rubrics

Each rubric is scored 0-3. Every score MUST cite specific transcript passages.

Rubric 1: Reasoning Completeness

Question: Are reasoning chains explicit and complete, or are there logical gaps?

Score	Meaning
0	Major logical leaps — conclusions don't follow from premises
1	Some steps shown but key transitions hand-waved
2	Most reasoning explicit, a few steps could be clearer
3	All reasoning chains complete — every step from premise to conclusion shown

What to check:

• Can you trace from evidence to conclusion without filling gaps?
• Are causal claims supported with mechanisms?
• Where "therefore" / "thus" / "obviously" appear, does the logic actually follow?
• Are historical analogies actually analogous (what's similar, what's different)?

Red flags: "Obviously", "clearly", "it follows that" hiding skipped steps. Causal claims without mechanism. Historical analogies without specificity.

Rubric 2: Adversarial Rigor

Question: Did debate actually stress-test ideas, or generate polite disagreement?

Score	Meaning
0	Polite agreement — characters don't argue
1	Surface disagreement — parallel assertions, not debate
2	Genuine conflict — direct challenges, but some dodged
3	Hostile cross-examination — every claim challenged, no hand-waving survives

What to check:

• Do characters directly respond to each other's claims, or just make separate speeches?
• Are points of order raised? Enforced?
• Does anyone concede too easily?
• Does consensus emerge suspiciously smoothly?

Red flags: "Good point, but..." (diplomatic deflection). Characters making separate speeches instead of engaging. Everyone converging by the end. "Both perspectives are valid" (premature synthesis).

Rubric 3: Assumption Surfacing

Question: Are hidden assumptions made explicit, or do they drive conclusions invisibly?

Score	Meaning
0	Major assumptions completely unexamined
1	Some assumptions mentioned but not interrogated
2	Most assumptions surfaced, some examination
3	Assumptions explicitly identified, challenged, inventoried

What to check:

• Are optimization criteria stated? (What are we optimizing for?)
• Are value judgments acknowledged as such?
• Do characters name their assumptions or just reason from them?
• Are meta-assumptions surfaced? (assumptions about the decision context itself)

Red flags: "We should do X because it's better" (better by what measure?). Different characters optimizing for different things without acknowledging it. "Obviously we want to maximize Y" (obvious to whom?).

Rubric 4: Evidence Standards

Question: Are claims supported by evidence, or accepted based on plausibility?

Score	Meaning
0	Unfalsifiable claims accepted without challenge
1	Evidence sometimes requested but often hand-waved
2	Most claims require evidence, some slip through
3	Strict evidentiary standards consistently enforced

What to check:

• Are factual claims verifiable?
• Are predictions testable? (What would falsify them?)
• When evidence is cited, is it actually relevant?
• Are absence-of-evidence arguments challenged?
• Is evidence proportional to stakes?

Red flags: Unfalsifiable claims going unchallenged. Anecdotes treated as patterns. Temporal proximity treated as causation. "We know" or "users want" without supporting data.

Rubric 5: Trade-off Explicitness

Question: Are trade-offs acknowledged with specifics, or papered over with "balance"?

Score	Meaning
0	Win-win claims — no downsides acknowledged
1	Trade-offs mentioned vaguely
2	Trade-offs named but not quantified
3	Specific trade-offs with clear consequences, time horizons, decision criteria

What to check:

• If option X is chosen, what is explicitly given up?
• Are costs as specific as benefits?
• Do "compromise" solutions acknowledge what each side sacrifices?
• Are time horizons stated?
• Are decision criteria explicit? (Under what conditions would each option be right?)

Red flags: "Best of both worlds". "We can balance X and Y" without specifying cost. Benefits specific, costs vague. Missing time horizons.

Beyond the rubrics: Structural assessment

After scoring the five rubrics, assess these structural qualities. These don't get numeric scores but inform the overall verdict.

Charter fitness: Did the deliberation actually address the stated problem? Or did it drift to adjacent/easier questions?

Character calibration: Read the roster from references/roster.md. For each character, check whether they stayed true to their documented propensity and avoided their documented failure mode. Use the calibration examples (good/bad) from the roster file as reference points. Were they well-calibrated (evidence-based, not caricatures)?

Engagement depth: Did the debate evolve? Did characters actually change the terms of the argument, or did they repeat their opening positions?

Synthesis quality: Does the final synthesis honestly represent the tensions, or does it smooth them over? Does it give the decision-maker a genuine map, or a comfortable narrative?

Output format

The review should follow this structure:

## Independent Review

### Charter
[State the problem/decision the committee was asked to deliberate on]

### Rubric Scores

**1. Reasoning Completeness: [0-3]**
[Cite specific passages. Explain score. State what would raise it.]

**2. Adversarial Rigor: [0-3]**
[Cite specific passages. Explain score. State what would raise it.]

**3. Assumption Surfacing: [0-3]**
[Cite specific passages. Explain score. State what would raise it.]

**4. Evidence Standards: [0-3]**
[Cite specific passages. Explain score. State what would raise it.]

**5. Trade-off Explicitness: [0-3]**
[Cite specific passages. Explain score. State what would raise it.]

### Aggregate Score: [sum/5, to one decimal]

### Structural Assessment

**Charter fitness**: [Did the deliberation address the actual problem?]
**Character calibration**: [Were characters well-tuned or caricatured?]
**Engagement depth**: [Did the debate evolve or just repeat?]
**Synthesis quality**: [Does the synthesis honestly map the tensions?]

### Biggest Gaps
[Top 2-3 weaknesses, ordered by impact on trustworthiness]

### What Would Most Improve This Deliberation
[Specific, actionable recommendations — not "be more rigorous" but
"Joe's 2022 analogy needs: what specifically failed, root cause,
what's different now"]

### Verdict

**Trustworthiness as decision input**: [High / Medium / Low]

[1-2 sentence summary of why]

Scoring interpretation

Average	Meaning	Recommendation
2.5-3.0	High quality — rigorous, trustworthy	Safe to use as decision input. Extract lessons.
1.5-2.4	Decent but gaps — meaningful weaknesses	Identify low-scoring rubrics. Regenerate those sections. Re-evaluate.
0-1.4	Poor quality — largely theater	Don't trust output. Regenerate from scratch. Review prompting approach.

Evaluation discipline

When conducting the review, enforce these rules on yourself:

1. Read the entire transcript before scoring. Don't score incrementally — you need the full picture.

2. Score each rubric independently. Don't let a high score on one inflate another. A deliberation can have excellent evidence standards but terrible trade-off explicitness.

3. Cite or it didn't happen. Every score must reference specific transcript passages. If you can't cite evidence for a score, the score is wrong.

4. Evaluate what's on the page, not what was intended. You don't know (and shouldn't care) what the generator was trying to achieve. You see only the output.

5. Be adversarial toward quality claims. If the transcript looks rigorous at first glance, look harder. Where are the seams? What's missing? The job is to find weaknesses, not confirm strengths.

6. Be specific in feedback. Not "reasoning could be more complete" but "Maya's claim about CTO sabotage jumps from 'budget was cut' to 'political motivation' without ruling out alternative explanations."

7. Don't grade on a curve. A 3 means 3 per the rubric definition, regardless of how good the deliberation is relative to other deliberations you've seen.

Usage patterns

After a committee deliberation

/review

The skill finds the most recent committee output in the conversation and reviews it.

Review from situation directory

/review --situation ../situations/microservices-adoption

or: "review the last deliberation record"

• Resolve the situation directory (via --situation, config, or the path the user provides) and locate <situation-dir>/deliberations/. If "last deliberation record," use the most recently modified situation directory under the situations root.
• Read 02-deliberation.md as the transcript. Optionally read 00-charter.md for the charter (problem statement). Read 01-convening.md if present to check for remediation_threshold (default 13) and max_remediation_rounds (default 2).
• Choose the evaluation file: If no evaluation file exists in the directory, write to 04-evaluation-1.md. If 05-remediation-1.md exists but 06-evaluation-2.md does not, write to 06-evaluation-2.md. If 07-remediation-2.md exists but 08-evaluation-3.md does not, write to 08-evaluation-3.md. Always use a numbered evaluation file (04-evaluation-1 for the first review).
• Perform the same five-rubric review as above. Write the result to that file. Include in transcript_review: rubric scores (reasoning_completeness, adversarial_rigor, assumption_surfacing, evidence_standards, tradeoff_explicitness), sum of the five scores (0–15), aggregate/average for display, verdict (High/Medium/Low), biggest_gaps, recommendations. If the file already has a resolution_evaluation section, keep it and add transcript_review alongside it.
• After writing: If sum < threshold (default 13; overridable in 01-convening.md), state that the deliberation is below the bar and suggest: "Run a remediation round: ask the committee to respond to this evaluation (e.g. '/committee remediation --situation <path>' or 'committee respond to evaluation for this deliberation'). Max 2 remediation rounds."

With a pasted transcript

/review
[pasted transcript]

The skill reviews the provided transcript.

Requesting focused review

/review focus:evidence,reasoning

Run full review but provide extra depth on specified rubrics.

Resolution-only evaluation (04-evaluation-1.md, etc.)

When a deliberation was saved to <situation-dir>/deliberations/, that directory may also contain resolution-only evaluation: an assessment of whether the resolution (03-resolution.md) satisfies the charter (00-charter.md), without reading the transcript. The reviewer uses only 00-charter.md and 03-resolution.md, scores alignment_with_goal, completeness, feasibility, risk_mitigation, and writes a resolution_evaluation section to the same evaluation file used for transcript review (04-evaluation-1.md for first pass, or 06/08 when the feedback loop has run). The same review skill can perform this as a second pass: when asked to "evaluate the resolution" or "run resolution-only evaluation" for a deliberation directory, read only 00 and 03, score against the charter, and write or update that evaluation file with resolution_evaluation. The transcript review (five rubrics on 02-deliberation.md) is stored under transcript_review in the same file.

Suggesting the review

After any /committee deliberation, proactively suggest:

"Want me to run /review on this to check the quality? The independent evaluation can catch theatrical rigor that looks convincing but doesn't hold up."

The committee writes to <situation-dir>/deliberations/. You can add:

"I can evaluate the transcript and write the review to 04-evaluation-1.md in the situation's deliberations directory, or run a resolution-only evaluation (charter + resolution, no transcript)."

This nudge is part of the cybernetic feedback loop — generator + evaluator in tension drives improvement.

Integration with committee skill

The review skill completes the adversarial training loop:

1. /committee [topic] — generates deliberation (generator)
2. /review — evaluates deliberation (discriminator)
3. Low scores → user asks committee to address specific gaps
4. /review again → checks if gaps were addressed
5. Repeat until scores stabilize or user is satisfied

This is adversarial training for narrative quality. The tension between generation and evaluation drives improvement.

Evaluation feedback loop (remediation)

• Score: The sum of the five rubric scores (0–15). Each rubric is 0–3.
• Threshold: If sum < 13 (default), the deliberation is below bar. The threshold can be overridden in the convening file (01-convening.md) for that deliberation.
• Trigger: After writing the evaluation file, if sum < threshold, tell the user to run a remediation round: the committee responds to the evaluation (point-by-point), produces 05-remediation-1.md (or 07-remediation-2.md), appends to 02, and may update 03. Then run review again; it will write to 06-evaluation-2.md (or 08-evaluation-3.md). Example: "/committee remediation --situation <path>".
• Cap: Max 2 remediation rounds. After two rounds, stop even if still below threshold.

What success looks like

After running the review, the user should be able to:

• See exactly where the deliberation was strong and weak
• Understand what specific improvements would raise quality
• Make an informed judgment about whether to trust the deliberation as decision input
• Know which sections to regenerate vs. which to keep
• Distinguish between theater (looks rigorous, isn't) and genuine rigor

Files reference

• Evaluation rubrics detail: references/evaluation-rubrics-reference.md
• Independent evaluation theory: references/independent-evaluation.md
• Operational roster: references/roster.md
• Extended character reference: references/character-propensity-reference.md