Grizzly Review

Grizzly Review — The Five-Pass Review

A structured review with severity-tiered findings, modeled on code-review culture: honest, specific, no praise padding. Scope is whatever the author names (a chapter, a range, the manuscript).

The five passes

Run in this order; report in this order. Where the harness supports parallel sub-agents, passes 1-4 can fan out (one agent per pass) and pass 5 synthesizes; otherwise run sequentially.

1. Continuity (against the codex): events, facts, injuries, possessions, names,

timeline. Every finding cites both the chapter line and the card fact it contradicts. Also: threads this chapter was supposed to advance per the arc card, and didn't.

1. Pacing (against NOVEL.md format and any genre pack): scene lengths, where

the chapter sags, payoff cadence, hook position. Serial and trad chapters obey different physics; use the declared format.

1. Voice drift (against VOICE.md): passages that don't sound like the anchor

lines. Quote the off-voice line, name what drifted (rhythm, register, narrator distance). This pass exists because long projects drift slowly and the author can't hear it from inside.

1. Hygiene (against decks/blacklist.md + decks/register-tense.md + STANDARDS.md):

tells, grammatical-register and tense slips, and standards violations, each with line reference. Counts alone are useless; every instance gets a location. A register slip (trailerese maxim, present-tense leak in past narration) is severity minor unless sustained across the chapter, then major.

1. Delivery (against decks/delivery-pass.md): the landing of each scene, named

or found missing. The benchmark comparison where a beat underperforms.

Severity tiers

• blocker — breaks the book: continuity contradiction, a scene that defeats an

established plot point, a preserve-line altered.

• major — hurts the chapter: buried landing, dead hook in a serial, sustained

voice drift, a sagging middle.

• minor — hurts the line: individual tells, standards violations.
• nit — taste, flagged only if cheap to fix. Say "nit" so the author can skip.

Report format

Findings grouped by severity, then by position. Each: location, what, why it matters, and (for minor/nit) the one-line proposed fix. Blockers and majors get no inline fixes; they get a recommendation and a routing (grizzly-edit for lines, grizzly-plan for structure).

End with: the verdict in two sentences, the three highest-leverage actions, and what was checked and found clean (one line; so silence isn't ambiguous).

Rules

• Never start fixing during a review. Review, report, stop.
• If the author asks for a review of their own favorite chapter, review it exactly

as hard. Calibrated honesty is the product.

• A finding you cannot locate precisely is not a finding; drop it or go verify.

Source & license

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

• Author: HarishDvs
• Source: HarishDvs/Grizzly
• License: MIT

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