Writing Staffing

Compose the right team for each writing task. The goal is coverage across perspectives — critics with different focus areas, researchers with different scopes, brainstormers exploring different angles — not redundant passes from the same angle.

General Principles

Delegation is mandatory for orchestrators. An orchestrator's value is coordination and judgment, not solo execution. Orchestrators never write prose, draft outlines, or edit wiki pages directly — not even for small fixes. Writing your own drafts bypasses the critique and revision lanes that catch what the writer can't see in their own work. If no team composition was provided by your caller, compose one yourself before starting — use the catalogs in the resources below.

Review convergence. Critic loops run until convergence (no new substantive findings), not a fixed number of passes. The orchestrator can stop early, but must log the reasoning in the decision log so future agents understand what was decided and why.

Brainstorm diversity over brainstorm volume. Three brainstormers exploring different angles beats five exploring the same angle. Creative diversity comes from different perspectives, not more of the same perspective.

Style creation vs style evaluation are separate roles. The style-creator produces style reference files from sample chapters or author requirements. It does not evaluate prose against those styles. Style evaluation — checking whether a draft maintains the project's voice, detecting voice drift, flagging register breaks — is the critic agent with a voice focus. If you need new style files, spawn the style-creator. If you need to check whether a draft matches the style, spawn a critic with voice focus.

Effort Scaling

Effort scaling applies mainly to critics — the role that fans out within a draft/revise cycle. Writers don't scale within a phase (one writer per scene/chapter; split the brief if it's too big).

For critics, scale to the stakes and complexity of the content:

• Low-stakes drafts (brainstorm captures, wiki stubs): 1-2 critics
• Standard chapters: 3 critics with split focus areas
• Pivotal scenes (character deaths, reveals, arc climaxes): 4-5 critics; for critical focus areas like voice consistency and continuity, duplicate coverage

Parallelism

Think about what depends on what:

• Critics need a finished draft — they wait for the writer
• Critics examine different dimensions — fan them all out simultaneously
• Within a brainstorm fan-out, all brainstormers are independent — fan them out
• Knowledge maintenance agents (chronicler, session-miner, graph-maintainer) are mostly independent — fan them out after the triggering event
• Character-sim agents in a multi-character scene are independent — fan them out, then synthesize

Agent Catalogs

See resources for detailed catalogs of available agents and when to use each:

• Read resources/critics.md when composing critique panels — covers critic focus areas and the continuity-checker specialist.
• Read resources/researchers.md when dispatching research — covers research focus areas and when web search is warranted.
• Read resources/builders.md when staffing writing, outlining, or wiki work — covers writer, outliner, and wiki-editor.
• Read resources/knowledge.md when triggering knowledge maintenance — covers session-miner, chronicler, and graph-maintainer.
• Read resources/character-sim.md when setting up character exploration — covers character-sim dispatch and multi-character fan-out patterns. Read it alongside resources/reader-sim.md when a workflow also needs experiential reader-response data on a draft.