Content
77%Weight 40%Scale 1-5Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.
An exemplary orchestration body: a lean overview with a strictly ordered spine, explicit validation gates and failure-recovery loops, and a verified one-level-deep reference structure. The single weak spot is prose construction — several stages compress multiple binding rules into single ~120-word sentences with nested exceptions and double negatives that demand re-reading.
Suggestions
Split the Stage 3d and Stage 4 run-on sentences into short imperative bullets so each nested exception (peer authorization, forms of a terminal outcome, failed-reviewer handling) is a separately scannable rule rather than a clause inside a 120-word sentence.
Move the double-negative authorization policy in Stage 3d ("do not ask the user to confirm a second time, and do not skip the peer because the user did not repeat that authorization") into references/cross-model-review.md, keeping only the routing decision and the override conditions in the spine.
Trim meta-explanations in the operating principles — e.g., "This governs *what* you surface and suppress, not the wording; use your own voice" — down to the rule itself, since the rules are self-explanatory.
| Dimension | Reasoning | Score |
|---|---|---|
Conciseness | The body has zero conceptual padding — everything is operational policy — but load-bearing rules are buried in 100+ word run-on sentences with nested exceptions and double negatives (e.g., Stage 4's "a terminal outcome may arrive as the call's return, a blocking wait's return, or a host-delivered terminal message that names the launch and carries its payload; a progress update is not one"), matching 'mostly efficient but could be tightened'. Not 4 because the convoluted constructions are more than minor trimmable instances; not 2 because no section is padded or explains things Claude already knows. | 3 / 5 |
Actionability | Concrete guidance throughout: exact commands ("git rev-parse --show-toplevel"), exact config paths ("<repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml"), exact forbidden tool names, exact tokens ("apply:local", "mode:agent"), and per-stage reference routing — matching 'mostly executable guidance; minor gaps'. Not 5 because key mechanics (active-agent cap, collection bounds, valid compact returns) are deferred to references, so the body alone is not end-to-end executable. | 4 / 5 |
Workflow Clarity | "Follow these steps in order" plus seven numbered stages with explicit validation gates (the Review depth gate before Stage 2, terminal-outcome collection rules, "a tool error or malformed output is recorded as a failed reviewer") and error-recovery loops ("If launched work cannot be collected reliably, stop it, and ... run the cleanup ... before returning the failure result") matches the top anchor. Not 4 because checkpoints are explicit rather than implicit, and the batch dispatch has full failure handling. | 5 / 5 |
Progressive Disclosure | Verified against the actual bundle: all ten files named in the body exist in references/, each stage names exactly one reference with explicit read timing ("Read each reference when you enter the step whose own work it governs"), leaf subagents read finish-review.md from disk instead of the orchestrator opening it, and persona assets are isolated under references/personas/ — a clear one-level-deep, well-signaled structure. Not 4 because per-stage named routing with read timing is better organized than the 'mostly clear' anchor example. | 5 / 5 |
Total | 17 / 20 Passed |