Autonovel Grade

Autonovel — Grade (user-triggered, manual quality report)

Run every mechanical slop detector plus the sentence-grading pass over a scope and write a self-contained report. This skill is user-triggered only — it is never part of the autopilot path, never invoked or waited on by the pipeline, and never invoked by any other skill.

When to use this skill

• User says "grade chapter N", "grade the manuscript", "how sloppy is chapter N", or "give me a slop report"
• User is reviewing the needs_attention queue in state.json (populated by the drafting skill's surgical-rewrite stall rule — see autonovel-drafting/references/retry-policy.md) and wants a detailed report on the flagged chapters before deciding whether to fix them by hand or hand them to a stronger model
• Never invoked automatically — this skill only runs when the user asks for it directly

Prerequisites

!`test -d "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/chapters" && ls "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/chapters" | head`

The novel needs at least one drafted chapter.

Workflow

Step 1 — Resolve scope

The user supplies a scope: a chapter, a range, or "manuscript" for everything. Use autonovel-prose-review/references/scope-resolver.md (reference it, don't duplicate its logic) to map natural-language scopes to chapter ranges. If the scope is ambiguous, ask the user to clarify and show your interpretation before proceeding.

Step 2 — Check state.json for needs_attention

Read $AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/state.json. If needs_attention is non-empty:

• Any entry with a chapter number that falls inside the resolved scope must be covered in the report regardless of how it scores mechanically — call it out explicitly in the summary.
• An entry with "chapter": null is a systemic pattern note (3+ consecutive chapters stalled during drafting). Surface its note text verbatim at the top of the report's Summary section — it usually points at an outline or foundation problem, not chapter-level slop, and the user needs to see it before reading chapter-level findings.
• If the user's scope doesn't include a flagged chapter but needs_attention has entries, mention their existence and chapter numbers in passing so the user can re-run with a wider scope.

Also read genre_context/story-contract.md, genre_context/compiled/evaluation-chapter.md, and genre_context/resolved.json. The first two supply the story-specific and selected-pack evaluation criteria for the report; resolved.json supplies the generated pattern bundle and provenance.

Assemble a separate current PROFILE REQUIREMENTS block for each chapter in scope. The assembler reads profile.rating and profile.content_tags from state.json, normalized tags and literal exclusions from genre_context/resolved.json, the coverage map from outline.md, and the matching rating definition from ../autonovel/references/ratings.md:

!`python ${HERMES_SKILL_DIR}/../autonovel/lib/profile_requirements.py --state "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/state.json" --resolved "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/genre_context/resolved.json" --outline "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/outline.md" --ratings "${HERMES_SKILL_DIR}/../autonovel/references/ratings.md" --chapters `

The assembler reads the outline's Content-Tag Coverage Map and includes only the content tags assigned to that chapter. Use that chapter's block in its grading call and report section. Keep blocks current if state, outline, or resolution changes. For manuscript scope, separately audit every state profile.content_tags entry against the complete coverage map and manuscript; report undelivered coverage as a manuscript-wide finding rather than injecting all tags into every chapter's block.

Step 3 — Run the mechanical detectors

Using this skill's own vendored libs (never the ones in a different skill's lib/), for each chapter file in scope, in order, run the slop scan:

!`python3 ${HERMES_SKILL_DIR}/lib/slop_detect.py "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/chapters/" --genre-context "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/genre_context/resolved.json"`

Then run the manuscript-wide repetition scan over ALL chapters (repetitions are manuscript-relative even when grading a single chapter — a phrase repeated in chapters outside the scope still matters if it also occurs inside it). Read slop.ngram_min_count from the novel's state.json and pass it explicitly rather than relying on the silent default:

!`python3 ${HERMES_SKILL_DIR}/lib/slop_ngrams.py "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/chapters" --min-count `

Import both slop_report AND find_spans from the vendored lib/slop_detect.py, load_patterns_from_resolved from the vendored lib/genre_patterns.py, and scan_manuscript(texts, min_count=) from lib/slop_ngrams.py. Load the generated tuple once per Grade run, then pass that same tuple to both detector functions for each chapter:

from genre_patterns import load_patterns_from_resolved
from slop_detect import find_spans, slop_report

genre_patterns = load_patterns_from_resolved(
    "$AUTONOVEL_WORKSPACE/$NOVEL_SLUG/genre_context/resolved.json"
)
spans = find_spans(chapter_text, genre_patterns=genre_patterns)
report = slop_report(chapter_text, genre_patterns=genre_patterns)

find_spans gives the exact matched text, position, ±80-char context, and selected-pattern provenance the report needs; slop_report gives the bounded-metric numbers (opener monotony, suddenly count, adverbed tags, etc.). Aggregate selected-pattern spans by (pack_id, pattern_id) and retain each pattern's severity and allowed max_count in its report row. Evaluate the chapter against the story contract and evaluation packet as a semantic section of the report; Grade remains read-only.

Note: the chapter values in slop_ngrams occurrence records are 0-based indices into the sorted ch_*.md file list — convert them to the file's NN chapter number when writing the report.

Step 4 — Run the sentence-grading pass

Run the grading prompt from autonovel-drafting/references/sentence-grading.md on each in-scope chapter. This is the one step in this skill that calls the LLM — it happens at runtime, when the user runs this skill via the Hermes agent, not as part of building or testing this skill. Parse the output with lib/grading.py parse_grades() and compute grading_gate(grades, max_weak_ratio, max_cut, expected_count=N) per chapter — limits from state.json's slop config, N = the number of sentences you numbered so the gate fails loudly if the model skipped any — plus flagged_sentences() for the WEAK/CUT indices. For chapters over ~4k words use lib/chunk_text.py chunk_by_token_budget to split the grading prompt (sentence numbering continuous across chunks) (budget per sentence-grading.md's 50k rule).

Prepend the current chapter's dynamic genre inputs to every grading call in this order:

GRADE REVIEW INPUTS

PROFILE REQUIREMENTS:
{PROFILE_REQUIREMENTS}

STORY CONTRACT:
{STORY_CONTRACT}

GENRE EVALUATION:
{GENRE_EVALUATION_BLOCK}

Fill the last two placeholders from genre_context/story-contract.md and genre_context/compiled/evaluation-chapter.md. The sentence-grading result and the semantic grade report therefore evaluate the same current restrictions.

Step 5 — Assemble the report

Write critique/slop_report_.md per references/report-format.md. Scope slug follows the same convention as prose-review: ch07, ch07-10, manuscript.

Step 6 — Report to the user

Report the file path and a short summary (chapters graded, findings count, WEAK/CUT ratio, needs_attention count) to the user. Do NOT modify any chapter and do NOT touch state.json.

Explicit note — read-only, user-triggered only

This skill only READS the manuscript and state.json, and only WRITES the report file. It never edits chapters, never updates state.json (not even to clear needs_attention — that queue is cleared by the phase skill that actually fixes the flagged chapter, not by this one), never advances phase, and is never invoked by another skill. It is not part of the autopilot path — the pipeline never invokes or waits on this skill.

Library utilities

• lib/slop_detect.py — mechanical slop detection: slop_report for the metric breakdown, find_spans for exact finding locations with context (no LLM)
• lib/slop_ngrams.py — manuscript-wide repeated-phrase scan (no LLM)
• lib/grading.py — sentence-grading parse + deterministic acceptance gate
• lib/chunk_text.py — for scopes longer than the sentence-grading chunk budget

See also

• references/report-format.md — the report structure
• autonovel-prose-review/references/scope-resolver.md — natural-language scope → chapter range mapping
• autonovel-drafting/references/sentence-grading.md — the sentence-grading prompt and processing rules
• autonovel-drafting/references/surgical-rewrite.md — what generated any mechanical findings still present
• autonovel-drafting/references/retry-policy.md — how needs_attention entries get written and what their fields mean

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: DukeTwoCan
• Source: DukeTwoCan/autonovel-agent-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.