Getting Feedback

Get audience-perspective feedback from up to three reviewers:

1. Legal tech blog reviewer (Marcus Tan) — legal technologists and lawyers who ship
2. Inhouse lawyer reviewer (Sarah Chen) — solo counsels with real budgets and no IT
3. Lawyer coder reviewer (Wei Lin) — lawyer-coders building on nights and weekends

Reviewers are constituencies, not auditors. Each reviewer is one of the blog's three target audiences, and their review answers: did this post serve me? Their reader-response verdict is the product; their suggestions are a bonus. They are instructed to report EVERYTHING unfiltered — the filtering happens here, at synthesis, not in their heads.

Which reviewers

Routing is decided at pitch time, not review time. pitch.md frontmatter declares primary_audience (and optional secondary). Run the declared audience(s) — normally 1-2 reviewers. Run all 3 only when the user asks, or the pitch declares all three (genuine broad appeal).

Portfolio balance: Houfu's aim is that no constituency is neglected for too long. When a secondary audience hasn't been served in a while, say so — it can justify adding their reviewer to the round, or tip the next post's topic.

If the pitch predates the primary_audience field, fall back to the CLAUDE.md routing table by content type and say which you picked and why, in one sentence.

Review order (enforced)

1. Pitch checkpoint. Compare the draft against pitch.md on thesis, scope, and emotional core — and against the ## Original framing block for subject drift. If they've diverged, stop and decide with the user which artifact is wrong: the draft wandered (revise it back), or the pitch was defective — in which case amending the pitch is the correct move (record in discussion.md which interrogation question would have caught it). Record the checkpoint with node scripts/workflow-state.js checkpoint <folder> "<verdict>" — the workflow gate blocks reviewer spawns until the current draft has one. The thesis-presence lint output is the evidence to bring to this comparison.
2. Lint, then one content audit, maximum, before reviewers. npm run lint-posts <folder> first (it now covers word budget, thesis presence, mechanical prose defects). Then the two audit agents — audit-substance and audit-tone, launched in one message. Apply critical fixes only; hold judgment calls for the reviewers.
3. Reviewer round(s) per the routing above. Pass each reviewer: pitch.md (the scope oracle), relevant discussion.md sections, their memory file path with an instruction to read it first, and any relevant research.
4. Synthesis (below) — this is where filtering happens.
5. Final polish.

Synthesis: this is where filtering happens

Reviewers report everything. You do the filtering, in this order:

1. Verdicts first. Report each reviewer's serves-me verdict and reader-response paragraph before any suggestion. A post that fails its primary audience's verdict has a framing problem, not a fixes problem — that goes to Houfu, not into edits.
2. Conflicts are presented, never averaged. When constituencies want opposite things, that is a "who is this post for" decision — Houfu's call, and often his "neither is wrong" material. Splitting the difference serves nobody.
3. Scope gate. Group findings by the reviewer's SCOPE field. IN-scope findings are the round's work, weighting the primary audience's wants over secondary ones. OUT-of-scope findings go to Houfu in a single collapsed list headed "Beyond the pitch — follow-up post material?" — do not silently discard them; OUT findings are how pitch defects and next posts get discovered. If an OUT want is genuinely better than what the pitch promised, that is a pitch amendment (step 1), not a draft edit.
4. Length gate. Sum the reviewers' TOTAL DELTA lines. If the net is positive by more than ~10% of current length (or the draft is already at its word_budget cap), apply the CUT findings first, then the additions. You have the cuts — every reviewer was required to supply them. This is the length-audit-first rule with the cuts pre-collected.
5. Template gate. STANDING findings are batch-applied without discussion and never justify a round 2. WISH/CUT/KEEP findings specific to this post are the round's value.
6. Delivery gate. Now soften — once, here. Be direct about the substance and kind about the person. The reviewers were told not to filter so that nothing was lost upstream; the filter is in how you say it, never in what was found.

Round cap (enforced mechanically)

Maximum 2 reviewer rounds per draft, 1 audit round — counted by the workflow gate keyed to the draft's content hash, so audit-polish cycles count as rounds and parallel fan-out counts once. If the same core framing issue persists after round 2, switch to brainstorming with the user — reviewers diagnose, they don't fix framing problems. If Houfu explicitly asks for another round, record it: node scripts/workflow-state.js override <gate> "<his reason>".

After each round: update reviewer memory

Each reviewer ends with a MEMORY_UPDATE block. Append each block (with date and round number) to that reviewer's log in docs/personas/memory/<agent-name>.md. When the user rejects advice with a reason, record it under "Settled disagreements" so no reviewer re-raises it.

Compact while appending: keep the last 3 posts' log entries verbatim; for anything older, promote genuinely reusable catches into "Past unique catches" or "Settled disagreements" and delete the log entry. The top matter is what the reviewer acts on; the log is only raw material for it.

Example flow

User: Is this a good way to end the post about my open source legal tool?

Claude: pitch.md declares primary_audience: marcus, secondary wei-lin — running both.
Marcus: [reader response + verdict + findings]
Wei Lin: [reader response + verdict + findings]
Claude: Verdicts — Marcus: serves me; Wei Lin: partly (the close asserts what it hasn't earned).
        In-scope: [...]. Beyond the pitch (follow-up material?): [...]. Net delta +40 words, within budget.

Reminders

• Always announce that you're using this skill.
• Feedback isn't validation. It's fine to disagree with reviewers when there's a good reason — record the disagreement in their memory file.
• For final-draft review, see [finaldraft.md](finaldraft.md).