Critique Theater

Critique Theater

Design Jury is the user-facing name for Critique Theater. When the daemon

enables it for an artifact-generating run, it appends the active protocol,

brand source, thresholds, and weights to the agent prompt. The agent then plays

the fixed v1 cast — Designer, Critic, Brand, Accessibility, and Copy — as turns

inside the same CLI session.

Runtime contract

• Follow the daemon-injected tagged protocol exactly: one

<CRITIQUE_RUN> envelope containing <ROUND>, <PANELIST>,

and <ROUND_END> blocks and, only after a ship decision, one final

<SHIP> block. Do not emit prose outside the envelope.

• Designer drafts the artifact. Critic, Brand, Accessibility, and Copy score

their own scopes and record actionable <MUST_FIX> items. The cast is fixed

in v1; a plugin does not replace it with a custom list of axes.

• The daemon parses the stream incrementally into typed PanelEvent variants

and publishes them on critique.* SSE channels. It recomputes the composite

from the scoring panelists, so an agent-supplied composite is advisory.

• Do not write critique.json in the project cwd or emit a

kind: "critique-panel" object. Those were the pre-orchestrator shape and

are not inputs to the current runtime.

Convergence and persistence

The default review uses a 0–10 scale, an 8.0 ship threshold, and at most three

rounds. A round ships only when its daemon-computed composite reaches the

configured threshold and no open must-fix items remain. The active values

come from OD_CRITIQUE_* configuration, including

OD_CRITIQUE_MAX_ROUNDS, OD_CRITIQUE_SCORE_THRESHOLD, and the fallback

policy.

OD_MAX_DEVLOOP_ITERATIONS still caps an outer plugin pipeline stage; it is

not the Design Jury round limit or ship rule. Likewise, a pipeline's

critique.score signal is a scheduler-facing projection, not the wire output

the agent should manufacture.

The daemon stores the terminal run and per-round summaries in SQLite and

writes the ordered PanelEvent stream as a replayable NDJSON transcript

(gzip-compressed when large). Final artifact bytes are stored separately; the

ship event carries only an artifactRef.

Interrupting a run

The web Design Jury surface exposes Interrupt and an Esc shortcut. After

the user triggers either, the web app posts to

/api/projects/:projectId/critique/:runId/interrupt; the daemon aborts the

registered run, persists the partial best-so-far state, and emits

critique.interrupted. od ui respond handles GenUI surfaces and does not

provide a break-loop action for Critique Theater.