critic-loop

critic-loop is a skill for Claude Code from mronkko/claude-academic-research. It costs 75 tokens per session (6,643 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review workflow for revising academic writing, such as a research paper, thesis, or book chapter, through several critical perspectives. It can use critics focused on evidence, methods, arguments, or subject expertise.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run a structured review of a manuscript, choose critic perspectives, set an iteration limit, and optionally render the document for checking.
Why use it?
It helps reveal weaknesses in a draft from different angles and supports repeated revision. It also checks whether the required academic-research setup is available before starting.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT variable. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the academic-research plugin — 11 skills, 1 plugin shipped together

Good fit Use it to run a structured review of a manuscript, choose critic perspectives, set an iteration limit, and optionally render the document for checking.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add mronkko/claude-academic-research
Claude Code
/plugin install academic-research

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install academic-research, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 plugin.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for critic-loop

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mronkko/claude-academic-research/critic-loop.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mronkko/claude-academic-research/critic-loop)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mronkko/claude-academic-research/critic-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mronkko/claude-academic-research/critic-loop.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,643 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00075 $0.06643
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.03321
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.01329
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00664

Measured 8d ago against content hash d8d85148817b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

critic-loop scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/critic-loop/SKILL.md · 608 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 608 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

critic-loop

Invocation: /critic-loop <document-path> [--critics evidence,method,argument,expert] [--max-iter 4] [--no-test] [--render-cmd "quarto render {doc} --to gfm"]

Pre-flight (ALWAYS run first)

Before any step below, verify the plugin has been configured:

python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:-.}/scripts/setup/check_configured.py"

If the result is NOT CONFIGURED, stop immediately and tell the user:

The academic-research project has not been set up on this machine yet. Run the setup skill or setup wizard first — the evidence critic depends on MCP citation lookups (Zotero, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar), which require MCP servers that the setup wizard registers.

Do not launch critics or proceed with the loop. Running the setup skill/wizard is the required first step.

If the result is configured, proceed.


Execute the editing loop documented in the manuscript-revision skill. This skill is the procedure; that skill is the doctrine. Read it first if you have not recently.

Companion skills

  • manuscript-revision — the doctrine this skill executes as procedure. Read it first if you have not recently; it covers the editing philosophy this loop's adjudication step (Step 4) relies on.
  • empirical-integrity — owns the Step 1 test gate via test_empirical_integrity.py. A failure there is an empirical-integrity regression, not a critic-loop bug — fix the underlying claim/source mismatch per that skill's rules, then re-run the gate.
  • grounded-citations — the write-time rule-book for any new citation a critic's suggested edit introduces. If adjudication (Step 4) adds a claim that needs a source, follow grounded-citations when inserting the [@BBT_KEY], then let the evidence critic verify it next iteration.

Relationship to fact-check

fact-check is the standalone citation / claim audit. The evidence critic inside this loop covers the same ground during iterative revision.

Mutual-exclusion rule. Do NOT spawn a /fact-check run while this loop is active, and skip it immediately after a loop that finished with no unresolved evidence-critic MAJORs — the work is duplicate and burns MCP / Zotero quota twice. Use fact-check instead of this loop when the user wants a focused citation-only pre-submission report without the method / argument / expert perspectives.

Read the full file on GitHub · 608 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 608 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A d8d85148817b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

critic-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository mronkko/claude-academic-research (23 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 6,643 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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