Writing an article

Article is the default mode for new projects, so write and new start here - or set it explicitly with /mode article. The pipeline:

abstract → angles (pick one) → THESIS → outline → per section:
  research? → write (divergent drafts) → critique → revise → humanize → commit
→ cohesion pass → references → manuscript.md → SEO + promo (auto) → learn

The thesis comes first

Before any prose, the agent generates a contestable claim - with stakes, supporting arguments, a steelmanned counterargument and its rebuttal, and explicit non-goals. It’s persisted (thesis.json / thesis.md), shown in the run dashboard’s goal line, and injected into every writer and critic call. The critic blocks sections that merely cover the topic without advancing the thesis.

brief        # see the thesis, audience, target length, intake answers

Divergent first drafts

With divergent_drafts: 2+, the first attempt samples N drafts at different temperatures (0.7 / 1.0 / 1.2) in parallel; the critic scores all of them and the winner gets refined. Selection for strength over convergence to safety. In manual interactive runs you pick the variant (with a glimpse + the critic’s verdict per variant).

Citations that actually resolve

With research on, every claim’s [N] marker is tracked against a per-article source registry (URL-deduped, first-seen order) and renumbered at commit so in-text citations always match the final References section. With research off, the critic treats specific uncited statistics as fabrication risks and blocks them.

The cohesion pass

Before References, an optional whole-article smoothing pass (article_cohesion, default on) fixes transitions, cross-section repetition, and terminology drift - and it’s guarded: if the edit shrinks the body more than 40% or loses headings, the original is kept.

Found and shared, not just written

With auto_promote on (default), a finished article gets a SEO + promotion pass: a deterministic on-page audit plus a flash keyword pack (threaded into the writer up front; the title is optimized after validation) written to seo_report.md, and platform-native promo variants (X thread, LinkedIn, newsletter teaser, TL;DR) plus headline variants under promo/. Both only produce local files - nothing is posted anywhere. Run them by hand any time with seo and promote.

What you end up with

articles/<project>/
  manuscript.md      the assembled article (title, byline, sections, references)
  thesis.md          the claim it argues
  sources.json       the verified source registry
  versions/          every draft variant, revision, and committed final
  images/            generated SVG diagrams
  seo_report.md      on-page audit + keyword pack (auto, or `seo`)
  keywords.json      the keyword pack signals
  promo/             platform variants + headline variants (auto, or `promote`)
  restyled/          voice rewrites you request (Export → Rewrite / restyle)
  eval_report.md     after you run `eval`