Adversarial Re Read

Why this exists

First-pass extraction systematically misses 15–25% of extractable content. Three failure modes compound:

1. Truncation by default — head 200, pdftotext file.pdf | head, and "summarize this" prompts to subagents silently lose content past the window. The reader doesn't see what they didn't read.
2. Synthesis pressure — once you have ~80% of the headline points, the pull toward writing the deliverable is stronger than the pull toward exhausting the source. "I have enough to synthesize" feels like done-ness; it's satisficing.
3. Table-and-image blindness — text PDFs get attention; structured comparison tables and images get a quick glance. The cells you skim past are often where the implications hide. When extraction feeds a client-facing deliverable, the missed 15–25% can include items that change the deliverable shape — a hard requirement you didn't notice, a risk that becomes a new pre-flight task, a constraint that narrows the scope, a piece of context that changes the pricing posture.

The mandatory second pass forces the misses to surface before they ship.

When to invoke

Triggered by:

• A calling skill's pre-flight checklist line: "Run adversarial-re-read after Phase 1 curation — do not skip."
• Self-trigger: any time you've just produced a synthesis or extraction that will feed a client-facing deliverable, before presenting the synthesis as final.

When NOT to invoke

• Single-source quick-lookup tasks ("what does this email say")
• Routine retrieval ("summarize this calendar event")
• Content Claude generated itself with no external source to re-read against
• Trivial Q&A or formatting fixes

The procedure

Five steps. None skippable. Step 3b is conditional on its own trigger — the condition is not optional, the step is.

1. Bound the source explicitly

Before reading anything, count the source in full:

wc -l <source-file>           # for text/PDF (after pdftotext)
file <image>                  # confirm dimensions for images

State the count out loud in your reasoning. If the source is multi-file, list every file with its line count or size. The point: future-you cannot claim "I read the whole thing" without having seen the bound.

2. Read the FULL source — no truncation

For text: read every line. No head, no | head -200, no agent prompts that say "summarize." If the source is too large for one read window, slice it in spans and confirm you covered 100% of the line count from step 1. For PDFs: pdftotext -layout file.pdf - | wc -l first, then read every line from line 1 to N.

For images: re-view at full resolution, not a thumbnail. For tables, read every cell — every row × every column.

For multi-source web ingest: read every page that was fetched, not the search snippets that surfaced them.

3. Diff the synthesis against the source

Open your existing synthesis next to the source. For each section of the source (paragraph, bullet, table row, image cell), ask: does my synthesis reflect what this says, or did I skim past it?

This is the adversarial step. The mindset is: "I'm trying to find what I missed, not confirm what I got." If everything reflects, the synthesis is solid. If items are missing, list them.

3b. Check the other direction — when the synthesis carries quotes or attributed claims

Steps 1–3 look for omission: what the source says that the synthesis dropped. They cannot catch the opposite defect — a claim in the synthesis that traces to nothing, or to the wrong speaker. A fabricated quote survives every step above, because nothing in the source contradicts it; it simply is not there.

Run this when the synthesis contains a direct quote, a figure, a date, or a claim attributed to a named person. Skip it when the synthesis is your own summary prose with nothing attributed.

Agent(
  subagent_type="evidence-auditor",
  description="Verify the synthesis's claims trace to the source",
  prompt="Synthesis: <paste>. Source: <paths, with the line bound from step 1>. Work synthesis-to-source, the opposite direction from a completeness check: for EACH direct quote, figure, date and claim attributed to a named person, report TRACES / MISATTRIBUTED / NOT IN SOURCE, naming the source line that decides it. A quote that is close but not verbatim is MISATTRIBUTED, not TRACES. Do not report anything the synthesis omitted — that is already covered. No edits."
)

Anything back as MISATTRIBUTED or NOT IN SOURCE is corrected against the source or cut before the synthesis moves on. A wrong attribution is not a smaller error than a miss — it is the one a reader cannot detect.

4. Categorize each missed item

For every item the diff surfaces:

• Synthesis addition — a finding that just needs to land in the existing doc. Add it.
• Deliverable-shape change — something that changes how the downstream deliverable should be structured (new section, removed section, reframed section). Flag explicitly to the user before continuing.
• New task — something that becomes a pre-flight or pre-deliverable item the calling workflow needs to track. Create the task; don't just note it.
• Risk — something that could collapse the engagement scope if missed. Flag urgently to the user.

5. Document the second-pass result

Before declaring extraction complete, state:

• What the source bound was (line count, image dims, page count)
• What the diff produced (Nothing missed / N items found, categorized)
• Whether step 3b ran, and what it returned (or why its trigger did not apply)
• Whether any items required deliverable-shape changes or new tasks (and which) This is short — 3–5 lines in the working doc or chat. Its purpose is leaving a trace so future-you (or a fresh session) can tell the second pass actually happened, vs. was claimed.

The output

Concrete: an updated synthesis, plus (when applicable) new tasks, deliverable-shape flags, and a 3–5 line second-pass note in the working doc.

If the second pass surfaces zero misses, that's a valid outcome. State it explicitly: "Second pass: read all 437 lines + image at full res; nothing missed." Don't skip the documentation.

Why this works

1. Explicit comparison forces close reading. Diffing synthesis-vs-source forces every cell, every row, every paragraph to be acknowledged. First-pass reading lets the eye skip.
2. Forces full-source consumption. "Did I read every line?" is binary. Synthesis-driven reading is continuous and hard to bound.
3. Decouples extraction from synthesis. First pass mixes both — read a paragraph, decide if it's important, maybe note it. Second pass separates them — re-read as data, not as input to synthesis.
4. Catches truncation defaults. wc -l first, then read all of them, surfaces silent truncation that head/limit-style reads hide.