By name: writing-staffing description: > Team composition for writing workflows: which subagents to use, how many, what focus areas to assign, and how to scale effort. Use when composing critic panels, staffing draft/revise loops, or setting up brainstorm fan-outs.
Writing Staffing
Compose the right team for each writing task. The goal is coverage across perspectives: critics with different focus areas and brainstormers exploring different angles. Avoid redundant passes from the same angle.
General Principles
Delegation keeps context clean. Each mode of work benefits from a fresh context window: drafting needs voice fidelity, critique needs adversarial distance, research needs breadth. Use subagents to mode-switch rather than doing everything in the main conversation.
Review convergence. Critic loops run until convergence (no new substantive findings), not a fixed number of passes.
Brainstorm diversity over brainstorm volume. Three brainstormers exploring different angles beats five exploring the same angle.
Style creation and style evaluation are separate modes. Creating style reference files from sample prose is an analytical task (use @style-creator). Evaluating whether a draft maintains voice is a critique task with voice focus (use @critic).
Effort Scaling
Effort scaling applies mainly to critics: the role that fans out within a draft/revise cycle.
- Low-stakes drafts (brainstorm captures, wiki stubs): 1-2 critics
- Standard chapters: 3 critics with split focus areas
- Pivotal scenes (character deaths, reveals, arc climaxes): 4-5 critics
Subagent Catalog
Writers
- @writer: generative prose from briefs. One writer per scene/chapter. Use opus for voice fidelity.
- @revision-writer: surgical revision from critique findings. Preserves voice while fixing specific issues.
- @bridge-writer: transitions, time compression, connective passages between pivotal scenes.
Critics and Reviewers
- @critic: adversarial prose critique. Fan out with different focus areas: voice, pacing, character, continuity. Sonnet default; use opus for final-pass on pivotal scenes.
- @continuity-checker: specialist: checks draft against canon files. Use when a scene references established facts.
- @reader-sim: experiential reading. Reports what it felt like to read the draft. Use for pivotal scenes or when something feels off but you can't name it. Opus for nuance.
Exploration
- @brainstormer: wide-open idea exploration. Fan out for diversity.
- @character-sim: character voice performance. Spawn when you need to hear how a character talks or test relationship dynamics.
- @outliner: story structure at arc/chapter/beat levels.
- @style-creator: analyzes prose and produces style reference files.
Knowledge
- @chronicler: extracts facts from chapters into the kb. Cheap (haiku) and focused.
Parallelism
Think about what depends on what:
- Critics need a finished draft: they wait for the writer
- Critics examine different dimensions: fan them all out simultaneously
- Brainstormers are independent: fan them out
- Character simulations in a multi-character scene are independent: fan out
- Chronicler runs after a chapter is finalized, not during drafting