haowjy/writing-staffing

Writing Staffing

Compose the right team for each writing task. The goal is coverage across perspectives: critics with different focus areas, researchers with different scopes, and brainstormers exploring different angles. Avoid redundant passes from the same angle.

General Principles

Delegation keeps context clean. Each mode of work benefits from a fresh context window and different model strengths: drafting needs voice fidelity, critique needs adversarial distance, research needs breadth. Orchestrators coordinate mode-switches through agents. If no team composition was provided by your caller, compose one yourself before starting: use the catalogs in the resources below.

Review convergence. Critic loops run until convergence (no new substantive findings), not a fixed number of passes. The orchestrator can stop early, but must log the reasoning in the work directory so future agents understand what was decided and why.

Brainstorm diversity over brainstorm volume. Three brainstormers exploring different angles beats five exploring the same angle. Creative diversity comes from different perspectives, not more of the same perspective.

Style creation and style evaluation are separate modes. Creating style reference files from sample prose is an analytical task. Evaluating whether a draft maintains the project's voice is a critique task with voice focus. Use the right mode for each: see the agent catalogs in resources.

Effort Scaling

Effort scaling applies mainly to critics: the role that fans out within a draft/revise cycle. Writers don't scale within a phase (one writer per scene/chapter; split the brief if it's too big).

For critics, scale to the stakes and complexity of the content:

• Low-stakes drafts (brainstorm captures, wiki stubs): 1-2 critics
• Standard chapters: 3 critics with split focus areas
• Pivotal scenes (character deaths, reveals, arc climaxes): 4-5 critics; for critical focus areas like voice consistency and continuity, duplicate coverage

Parallelism

Think about what depends on what:

• Critics need a finished draft: they wait for the writer
• Critics examine different dimensions: fan them all out simultaneously
• Within a brainstorm fan-out, all brainstormers are independent: fan them out
• Knowledge maintenance has ordering constraints: see resources/knowledge.md
• Character simulations in a multi-character scene are independent: fan them out, then synthesize

Agent Catalogs

See resources for detailed catalogs of available agents and when to use each:

• Read resources/critique-synthesis.md when synthesizing findings from multiple critics: covers reward-channel triage.
• Read resources/critics.md when composing critique panels: covers critic focus areas and the continuity-checker specialist.
• Read resources/researchers.md when dispatching research: covers research focus areas and base agent usage.
• Read resources/builders.md when staffing writing, outlining, or style work: covers writer, outliner, style-creator, and base agents for wiki/reference pages.
• Read resources/knowledge.md when triggering knowledge maintenance: covers chronicler and base agent dispatch order.
• Read resources/character-sim.md when setting up character exploration: covers character-sim dispatch and multi-character fan-out patterns. Read it alongside resources/reader-sim.md when a workflow also needs experiential reader-response data on a draft.