Manuscript Finisher

Finishing pass for a manuscript that is content-complete and headed for layout. The point is to spend tokens only where judgment is needed: cheap local tools do the mechanical work; agents do the thinking.

Default style guide: Chicago. Default typography (house): curly quotes/apostrophes (' ' " "), tight em dashes (word—word). Both are configurable in config/.

The four layers (high token-efficiency → high judgment)

Layer 0 — Deterministic report (zero tokens)

Two local engines, no API:

• LanguageTool (languagetool CLI) — the open-source "Word grammar & spelling." Grammar, agreement, spelling, comma rules, repeated sentence openers.
• Vale (vale) — prose style + consistency: repeated words, house typography (straight quotes, spaced em dashes), and any custom rules.

Run it:

python3 scripts/run_lint.py <chapter>.md [more.md ...]      # human report
python3 scripts/run_lint.py --json <chapter>.md             # machine report

Output splits every hit into AUTO (mechanical, safe) and REVIEW (judgment). Spelling is filtered against config/allowlist.txt (proper nouns / domain terms — extend it per project; unknown real words flagged once go in here, not into prose changes).