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.