# Adversarial Re Read > First-pass extraction systematically misses 15–25% of extractable content because LLMs satisfice; this skill is the gate that catches those misses before they ship to a client-facing deliverable. It's a mandatory second-pass adversarial re-read of source material against the synthesis or extraction it produced. Use whenever a workflow extracts content, consumes transcripts, reviews attachments, or fetches documents and that extraction feeds a downstream deliverable. User says: "second pass," "re-read the source," "verify extraction," "what did I miss in the source," "did I capture everything," "diff my extract against the original." - Skill: `shawnclybor/adversarial-re-read` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add shawnclybor/adversarial-re-read` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/shawnclybor/adversarial-re-read/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Productivity - Author: shawnclybor (https://skillmd.com/u/shawnclybor) - Updated: 2026-09-21 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/shawnclybor/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: ```bash wc -l # for text/PDF (after pdftotext) file # 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: . Source: . 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.