voice-critic

Voice Critic — The Agent That Reads Your Past Edits

Most AI drafting pipelines run a drafter, a fact-checker, and a style-guide enforcer. All three are blind to the same thing: voice. A draft can pass all three and still read wrong, because "wrong" in that sense means "not how the author would have written it."

This skill runs a fourth agent whose entire job is to catch that gap. It reads a corpus of the author's own past edits and looks for places where the current draft would not survive the author's red pen.

When this skill fires

User says any of:

• "run voice-critic on "
• "voice check this"
• "does this sound like me"
• "check my voice"
• "voice-critic "

Argument

$ARGUMENTS is either:

• A path to a draft file (markdown, plain text, or similar), or
• Inline draft text passed directly in the message.

If neither is obvious, ask the user which draft to critique before proceeding.

Prerequisites

The user must have an edit corpus at one of:

1. The path in $VOICE_CRITIC_CORPUS_PATH if that environment variable is set
2. ~/.claude/skills/voice-critic/corpus.md (default location)

If neither exists, stop and point the user to setup.md in this skill directory. It walks through building a minimum-viable corpus (5 pairs) in about 15 minutes. Do not proceed without a real corpus — the example-corpus.md file is for reference only and should not be used as a live corpus, because it teaches generic "good writing," not the user's specific voice.

Steps

1. Locate the draft

If the argument is a path, read the file. If inline text, use it directly. If both are supplied, prefer the inline text and note the redundancy.

2. Locate the edit corpus

Check in order:

1. $VOICE_CRITIC_CORPUS_PATH if set
2. ~/.claude/skills/voice-critic/corpus.md

If neither exists, stop. Tell the user to read setup.md in this skill directory and assemble a corpus first. Do not fall back to example-corpus.md silently — that file exists only as a format reference.