# CFA Critiques

Artifact: [Coherence for Agents](COHERENCE-FOR-AGENTS.md)
Cycle: Four critique passes, convergence on pass four.

This file records the structural findings from each critique pass in the CFA drafting cycle. Surface-level edits and exchange-by-exchange dialogue are not preserved; only the findings that shaped the final text.

## Critique 1: Synthesis over A/B selection

Verdict: Neither draft converges. Synthesize.

Findings on draft A:
Recursion and rhythm work. Single-sentence beats land because form mirrors content. Drifts: restates "the system remains one" three times, recaps role definitions twice, dilates into mantra at the close.

Findings on draft B:
Structurally sharper. Opening question gets a direct answer in the second paragraph. Over-compresses: strips the recursion that is the argument. Reads as a competent summary of A.

Resolution: A synthesis preserving A's recursive cadence at structural hinges and B's discipline elsewhere. Cuts: link block above the lead (push recurrence too far down the page), three repetitions of "the system remains one", B's bulleted compression of the recurrence.

## Critique 2: Identifying the oscillation

Verdict: Iterate. Neither A nor B converges.

Findings:
A's failure mode is regression. Reintroduces nearly every cut from the prior synthesis. Single-sentence beats no longer enact the principle — there are too many, and they've become a tic.

B's failure mode is over-compression. The recurrence — the actual argument — gets one sentence in the lead and one sentence in the close. The producer/judge collapse is reduced to a parenthetical, losing the causal mechanism for why one-as-three is needed.

Both are worse than the prior synthesis. A bloated it. B starved it.

Required corrections:
1. Restore the function-call sentence ("the callee returns the desired value instead of the coherent value") — load-bearing for the comfort failure section.
2. Restore the producer/judge collapse cascade — the only place the reader sees why a dyad is structurally insufficient.
3. Cut the close to one sentence, not three.

Diagnosis: Each pass is optimizing for the immediate critique rather than the spine. The dyad is oscillating because each role responds to the most recent move rather than the governing question.

## Critique 3: Naming the comfort failure

Verdict: Converging. Two reinsertions remain.

Meta-observation: The oscillation between bloat and compression is itself a comfort failure of the kind the essay describes. Each pass closes the local gap (the previous version felt too long or too short) by reopening the shared one (the essay's spine). The fix is to stop revising the surface and lock the spine.

Findings:
B is the better skeleton. A has two organs B removed that it shouldn't have.

B cuts the MCA/MCI operational rule. Without it, "the smallest closing response" is undefined.

B cuts the reviewer-as-boundary-holder paragraph. Without it, the claim-evidence-verdict rule stays abstract.

Required reinsertions:
1. After "the smallest closing response" in §1: "Action changes the environment. Insight changes the model. Action comes first when available, because action creates the next evidence surface."
2. After "drift wearing the costume of judgment" in §2: "This is what the reviewer's role actually requires: the reviewer holds the boundary between artifact and contract. An approval must remain attached to the evidence surface; a request for changes must name the contract gap it claims to see."

Note on the meta-pattern: The first oscillation (bloat ↔ compression) had stopped. The cycle was now in a healthier oscillation: each pass kept a load-bearing element the other dropped. That is not drift; that is the cycle doing its job.

## Critique 4: Convergence

Verdict: Converged. Lock A. Ship.

Findings: A and B are now the same essay. Three differences exist; none are structural.

1. Paragraph break in §1. A breaks the MCA/MCI rule into its own paragraph. B inlines it. A's choice is marginally better.
2. Paragraph break in §2. A breaks the reviewer reinsertion into its own paragraph. B fuses it onto the preceding paragraph. B's choice is marginally better — the reviewer paragraph applies the rule stated in the preceding sentence; separating them weakens the connective tissue.
3. Recurrence syntax in close. A: "one-as-two as relation, one-as-three as relation made inspectable." B: "one-as-two (relation), one-as-three (relation made inspectable)." A's prose form reads better; B's parenthetical is more compact. A wins by a hair.

Why this is convergence, not stalemate: The previous oscillations were structural — sections moving, mechanisms appearing and disappearing. These three differences are typographic. The two texts make the same argument in the same order with the same load-bearing elements present. Continuing past this point would be optimizing local preference because the harder work was done.

Ship version: A with one edit — fuse the reviewer paragraph into the preceding one (B's choice on point 2), with a colon instead of a period after "actually requires" to make the connection explicit. Keep A's break for the MCA/MCI rule (point 1). Keep A's prose recurrence in the close (point 3).

## Load-bearing elements

These were identified during critiques 3 and 4 as elements that must not be cut in subsequent passes:

- The recurrence, stated once in the lead and demonstrated again at one-as-three, again at whole-to-whole composition, and again in the close.
- The function-call frame ("the callee returns the desired value instead of the coherent value").
- The MCA/MCI operational rule (action changes the environment, insight changes the model, action first when available).
- The producer/judge collapse cascade (producer avoids seeing, judge avoids naming, artifact passes, contract weakens).
- The reviewer-as-boundary-holder paragraph (concrete application of the abstract claim-evidence-verdict rule).
- The trust-as-reconstructable-boundary-behavior close.

## Final disposition

The cycle locked after critique 4. The verdict noted that further iteration would be taste, not coherence — and taste, sustained too long without a structural grievance, becomes its own comfort failure.
