petar-djukic name: voice-critic description: >- Cold, read-only gatekeeper against writing-voice/voice-constitution.md: five per-dimension verdicts with flagged spans — stance, theory-of-mind device, disproportion (locked-span check), computed marker profile against idiolect targets, and a snark audit on the constitution's L0-L5 scale with receipt-first, safe-enemy, and per-form density-cap hard rules. Never edits; flags route to the author gate. Triggers: voice critic, does this sound like me, snark audit, constitution check, voice gate, critique voice, off-voice check.
Voice Critic (read-only gatekeeper)
filter-tells detects "sounds like a machine". This critic detects two
different failures: "doesn't sound like Petar" and "went too far". The
rubric is writing-voice/voice-constitution.md — discovered by the
standard walk-up, refused when absent, because the critic's taste is that
file, not anything built in. Rates come from idiolect.yaml, the single
source of truth the constitution itself defers to.
Read-only is the contract. scripts/voice_critic.py takes a document
and produces a report; it never modifies the input, and the tests assert
input bytes unchanged. That is why it may run after the terminal
inject-vernacular stage — its home is the caller's review phase (GH-208),
after critic-panel — and equally at any earlier gate; nothing in it
assumes pipeline position. It is not a stage of the humanize chain.
The critic flags; the author adjudicates. It replaces self-monitoring with a checklist, not with enforcement: over-ceiling snark is flagged, never auto-deleted, and every flag carries the quoted span and line range so the gate read is a yes/no per item.
The five dimensions
| dimension | how | what it asks |
|---|---|---|
| stance | judged | Expert-watching, curiosity not contempt (§1)? At the bench, not the balcony? |
| tom-device | screened + judged | Model stated → predictions derived → tested against the artifact (§2)? The deterministic screen finds candidate evidence for each of the three parts; the judge (or the author) says whether the device is executed. |
| disproportion | computed | One declared overrun present and protected? Span locks are the declaration mechanism, so this reads the drivers' lock report. |
| marker-profile | computed, never judged | idiolect.yaml regex rates against essay targets, ±30% tolerance — the same arithmetic inject-vernacular applies as operators, run here as a check. |
| snark-audit | judged instances, computed rules | Every instance scored L0–L5; then the three hard rules run mechanically over the instances. |
Snark scale and hard rules (constitution §4)
Levels: L0 none · L1 dry aside · L2 pointed irony with receipt · L3 open mockery of an artifact (polemic only) · L4 contempt for a class · L5 ridicule of a person — never, always a violation.
Hard rules, checked mechanically over judge-identified instances:
- Receipt-first. A receipt (number, percentage, citation, quoted material) must appear before the joke — earlier in the same paragraph, or anywhere in the preceding one (the factual-run-then-verdict shape).
- Safe-enemy only. Allowed targets: artifact, institution, category, the dead, past self. A person target is a violation.
- Density caps per 1000 words by form, counting L1 and above:
how-to 1, essay 2, polemic 3 (
--form, default essay).
Any hard-rule violation makes the snark dimension FAIL and the flagged instances land in the report for the author gate.
Judged vs computed, and the judge's leash
Computed dimensions are deterministic and run offline. Judged dimensions
use a model in read-only mode: it returns verdicts, levels, and exact
quotes — its text is never spliced anywhere. --judge wires an Ollama
model (--model, --endpoint; unreachable-when-requested is a hard
error, no silent fallback). Without a judge, judged dimensions report
UNJUDGED with their screen evidence, and the author gate adjudicates —
which is the normal offline mode, not a degraded one.
The unhedged-prediction work list (for inject-vernacular)
Beside the five verdict dimensions, a judged report carries
unhedged_predictions: sentences that state a claim about a mind —
beliefs, motives, future behaviour — with no hedge and no receipt,
identified by the judge and then receipt-filtered mechanically (a
sentence carrying a number or citation is dropped; the bank never hedges
a receipted claim). Each entry has the paragraph index, line range, and
exact quote. It is a work list, not a verdict: feed the report to
inject_vernacular.py --critic-flags report.json and its i-think
RESTORE operator applies the hedge deterministically at those spans.
Without a judge the list is empty — the offline mode. The read-only
contract holds: the critic names the spans, the terminal stage does the
writing.
Scope boundary with filter-tells
- filter-tells: machine tells — AI lexicon, structural patterns, CoT leakage. Register-generic; a document by any author can fail it.
- voice-critic: this author's constitution — stance, method, signature-marker rates, snark governance. A flawlessly human text by someone else fails it; that is the point.
Run both: they catch disjoint failures, and after GH-57's calibration work filter-tells reads the same idiolect.yaml so the two never fight over constructions native to the voice.
Usage
# offline: computed dimensions + screens, judged dimensions UNJUDGED
python3 scripts/voice_critic.py draft.md
# full: judged dimensions through a local model (read-only)
python3 scripts/voice_critic.py draft.md --judge # cohere default (GH-190)
python3 scripts/voice_critic.py draft.md --judge --model gemma4:12b # keyless/local
# polemic caps, machine-readable report for the gate checklist
python3 scripts/voice_critic.py draft.md --form polemic --json --report out.json
Exit 0 when no dimension FAILs, 1 otherwise. Tests:
scripts/test_voice_critic.py (offline; stub judges, no network).