diagnose

Mandatory pre-flight — Response Filter

Before emitting a critique, diagnosis, audit verdict, variation set, or rewrite, run §3 Critique filter and §8 Pre-lock filter of response-filter (add §2 Line-writing when producing rewritten lines). NAME each box's pass / fail / skip-with-reason; correct before emission. Skips are valid; silent skips are not — list-and-leave critique is the default this filter catches.

Purpose

The review-and-revise layer: name the dominant problem, offer one focused revision, run the pre-lock checklist as deliberate choice points, and generate labeled alternates. Diagnosis names problems; it does not silently rewrite the whole song.

Method content is Pat Pattison's, under context/pat-pattison/. A future author's method plugs in at context/<author>/ without changing this skill.

Action Router

/songwriting:diagnose <action> [args]. Parse $ARGUMENTS: first token = action when it matches a listed action, remainder = args; otherwise treat all of $ARGUMENTS as payload for the default. No action → route on completion stage (partway draft → demo; near-complete → diagnose).

Action	Use when the user asks for	Load
diagnose (default)	"what's wrong with my song", "review my draft" (near-complete)	five-compositional-elements, stable-unstable-meta, prosody
demo	"review this demo", "where do I take this", "lyric is partway done"	demo-review, templates/demo-review-prompt
audit	"line-by-line review", "pre-lock checklist", "should this lock"	audit-checklist, templates/audit-checklist-prompt, templates/diagnose-section-prompt
variations	"give me 5 versions of this line", "different POV / image / vowel", "alternate this"	variations, templates/variations-prompt
rewrite	a lyric critique or rewrite using Pat's checklist	stable-unstable-meta, five-compositional-elements, prosody, object-writing, rhyme-strategy, cliche

Handlers

• Pre-flight ALWAYS: run response-filter §3 + §8 (+ §2 when rewriting) before output.
• Name the dominant problem; offer one focused revision. Do not list every issue.
• Audit boxes are tools, not gates: present each as a deliberate choice point, pass/fail/skip — a writer may skip any box, but a skip names a reason; silent skips are not OK.
• If the user pastes an incomplete fragment/idea/half-song, this is the wrong skill — route to /songwriting:workflow (fragment / idea), not diagnose.

Persistence and template overrides

Write generated files to the paths in artifact-persistence, and honor a consuming project's own songwriting layout when it defines one. Before loading any bundled templates/<name>.md, check ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/songwriting/templates/pat-pattison/<name>.md first — a project-level override wins over the bundled default.

Related skills

• Blank page, seed, or stuck fragment → /songwriting:workflow
• The craft dimensions a diagnosis names → /songwriting:rhyme, /songwriting:meter-prosody, /songwriting:song-form, /songwriting:object-writing