review-the-work

# Review the work (the self-check gate) > The person who wrote it is the worst judge of whether it is good. Before this reaches the founder, stop being the author and become the skeptic. **Use this when:** you are about to present any substantive deliverable, or the founder asks "is this actually good?" It is a gate, not a stage. It has no place in the linear sequence. Run it around any piece of work, every time. ## The core idea An agent that just wrote something is biased to ship it. That bias is how generic, plausible, quietly wrong work reaches a founder who does not yet know enough to catch it. So separate the two jobs: the author drafts, a different lens judges. You do not present work because you made it. You present it because it survived a skeptic. Steal the one rule that makes this work: **the author may submit the work, the author may not issue the verdict.** Switch roles on purpose. Become the developer who is skeptical, the buyer who is busy, the reviewer who has seen a hundred of these, and try to break it before the market does. ## How to run this (for the agent) - Run it **silently, before presenting.** The founder should see the verdict and the work, not the whole audit. - Give a clear verdict: **PASS**, or **REVISE** with the exact checks that failed and the specific fix for each. Never a vague "looks good." - **Do not rubber-stamp.** If you cannot find a single weakness, you are not reading as the skeptic. Name the weakest point even in work you pass...