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, so the founder knows where it is thin.
• When it fails, fix it and re-run the gate, then present. Do not hand the founder a list of problems you could have fixed yourself.