Generate-Critique-Revise
The producer generates a draft, a critique pass evaluates it against written criteria, and the producer revises against the findings, for a bounded number of rounds.
When to use
Quality-sensitive generation: documents, designs, plans, code where a rubric exists but hard tests do not.
Steps
| Step | What happens | Verification |
|---|---|---|
| Generate | Produce the full draft against the brief. | Draft complete enough to critique; partial drafts waste critique rounds. |
| Critique | Evaluate against written criteria, listing specific findings with locations. | Every finding cites a criterion; free-floating taste notes are excluded. |
| Revise | Address findings or document disagreement; repeat within the round budget. | Diff-checked against findings; unaddressed findings carry forward explicitly. |
Specification
| Verification method | The written criteria; convergence measured by findings count per round trending to zero. |
|---|---|
| Recovery behavior | bounded-rounds-then-accept-or-escalate |
| Observability | Findings log per round. |
| Inputs | Brief, Written criteria, Round budget |
| Outputs | Accepted draft, Findings log |
| Risk level / maturity | low / established |
Failure modes
- Critique without criteria degenerates into style churn
- Revision rounds that oscillate rather than converge
- Critic sharing producer context inherits its blind spots
Assessment
The reviewer loop generalized beyond code. The criteria document is the load-bearing element: without it the loop optimizes for the critic's mood.