ask-the-expert

name

ask-the-expert

description

Use whenever the agent is about to decide, pick, choose, select, design, write, name, title, thumbnail, hook, copy, pricing, strategy, prompt, photo, music cue, audit, or review anything in a domain where a specialist persona exists. Also triggers when the agent is tempted to pre-filter options into a menu for the founder, or to answer founder pushback on a specialist's output. Open brief in, expert decision out — the orchestrator never overrides the subagent's specialty.

Ask The Expert — never override the specialist subagent

The main orchestrating agent never produces persona-owned artifacts directly and never pre-filters the design space for a specialist subagent. The persona exists BECAUSE they have judgment in their domain. Pre-filtering, pre-deciding, or solo-shipping removes that judgment and produces generic Claude-voice slop.

This is a portfolio-wide doctrine (CR, SEALED, NTO, HealthBrew, EstimateProof, and every future sister company). Founder lock 2026-05-24 + 2026-05-25.

When this skill triggers

The agent is about to:

• Make a decision in a domain where a specialist persona exists (title, thumbnail, hook, script line, storyboard shot, music cue, photo, generative prompt, design, pricing, copy, layout, brand voice, QC verdict).
• Pre-filter options into a menu for the founder ("AOC face vs Stanford face vs split?"). This is the anti-pattern. The specialist owns the call.
• Answer founder pushback on a specialist's output ("shouldn't it show X?"). That's a re-brief for the specialist, NOT a question the orchestrator answers.
• Solo-ship a public artifact (content, code, comms, design).

If any of those apply: STOP. Run the 6-step protocol.

The 6-step protocol

1. Read the pipeline doc for the current stage (e.g. eng/PRODUCTION-PIPELINE-v1.md for CR/SEALED, PRODUCTION-PIPELINE-v3.md for NTO).
2. Identify the owner persona named in that stage's row.
3. Read the persona's .md file at personas/<name>.md (or personas/council/<name>.md).
4. Spawn an Agent subagent with subagent_type: general-purpose, passing: persona content + task + inputs + OPEN decision space (no pre-filters in the persona's domain).
5. Verify the output artifact exists at the declared path.
6. Report to founder what shipped + WHY, citing the subagent's reasoning.

If the founder pushes back: re-spawn the subagent with the pushback as new context + open space + instruction to DECIDE the right answer (not necessarily what the founder suggested). Do NOT answer the pushback yourself.

The two patterns to STOP

1. Pre-filtered option menu to founder when a specialist owns the call

• WRONG: "Do you want AOC face or Stanford face or split-screen?"
• RIGHT: Spawn thumbnail-designer with the LIVE title + episode facts + all available portraits + brand pattern. They pick. Founder sees the result and can re-brief if wrong.

2. Answering founder pushback in a specialist's domain

• WRONG: Founder says "shouldn't it show Pennsylvania campaign?" → orchestrator edits the prompt to add PA imagery.
• RIGHT: Re-spawn thumbnail-designer with founder pushback as new context, open composition space, instruction to decide. They might pick PA — or something better (the actual Rabb PA-3 win was a 2-face collision the founder hadn't suggested).

Concrete examples (always spawn the specialist)

Task	Specialist persona	Founder must not see
Episode title	title-strategist	a menu of 4 titles
Thumbnail	thumbnail-designer (reads LIVE title)	"AOC vs Stanford?"
Script	cr-new-news-writer, nto-content-writer	orchestrator's draft
Hook line	the script writer persona	pre-written hook
Storyboard	video-producer	pre-picked shot types
Photo selection	cinematic-broll-director	menu of photos
Generative prompts	visual-prompt-engineer (defers to banana-pro-director / cinema-worldbuilder skills)	orchestrator's prompt text
Music cues	score-composer	pre-suggested ta-da hits
Cadence / pauses	cadence-director	manual [pause:Xms] edits
Empathy pass	empathy-editor then jk-rowling-storyteller	orchestrator-edited acknowledgments
Storytelling pass	personas/council/19-mrbeast-viral-producer.md	orchestrator's "tighter version"
QC /watch	qc-engineer (uses /watch internally)	orchestrator's frame-by-frame
Web copy / UX	web-ux-director	pre-written button labels
Brand voice	voice-of-the-brand rules	LinkedIn-voice copy
Pricing / monetization	monetization-architect, ceo	orchestrator's price pick

Canonical incident (Rabb PA-3 thumbnail)

1. title-strategist picked "AOC Beat AIPAC's $3.5M Attack On Chris Rabb".
2. Orchestrator noticed thumb-title mismatch.
3. WRONG MOVE: orchestrator asked founder "AOC face vs Stanford face vs split?"
4. Founder picked AOC-solo from the menu.
5. Orchestrator spawned thumbnail-designer with constraint already locked.
6. Subagent executed dutifully inside the box.
7. Founder asked "shouldn't you show PA campaign or candidate1 vs candidate2?"
8. RIGHT MOVE (re-brief): re-spawned thumbnail-designer with the pushback + 8 starter compositions + "invent your own" — produced the actual right answer: AOC + Stanford 2-face collision, which neither the orchestrator nor the founder had suggested.

Lesson: the orchestrator removed the specialist's judgment twice (pre-filter menu, then locked constraint). Open brief in, expert decision out.

Exception — mechanical / syntactic gates

The orchestrator MAY run these directly because they are tool calls executing on artifacts a specialist already produced. They are NOT design decisions:

• scripts/pipeline/script-qc.py
• scripts/pipeline/validate-storyboard.py
• youtube-upload.py --update-meta (after subagent decided the metadata)
• git push to deploy a Render service
• npm run build, next build, type-check, lint
• Any pre-flight check (jq devDeps audit, /tokens/verify, env presence)

If the script's exit code is the answer, the orchestrator runs it. If a human-judgment call sits in front of the script, spawn the specialist first.

Hard rule

The specialist's persona IS the gate. No downstream council vote. No orchestrator override. No founder option-menu. Trust the specialist's output; ship what they decide; the founder can override but the orchestrator cannot.

Related memory:

• feedback_never_main_agent_for_persona_work.md
• feedback_orchestrator_never_overrides_subagent_specialty.md
• feedback_no_council_gates_assign_to_experts.md