My favorite adversarial review prompt

Work gets better when it's reviewed after completion. That's at least as true for agentic work as it is for human work. Many moons ago, Harper taught me a cute trick for getting an agent to think critically about work it had just completed. Look at this again with fresh eyes. The phrase "fresh eyes" is kind of magic. You'll usually get startlingly good results with just that one sentence. But sometimes you need...more. Having an agent review its own work is a little bit fraught for the same reason that it's not always a good idea to let students grade their own papers or let car companies self-certify their cars' emissions. When you're checking your own work, you have conflicting goals. And LLMs do really, really poorly when they have conflicting goals. That's where adversarial review comes in. At it's simplest, adversarial review is just: Hey Claude, could you please have a subagent check over this work? Many folks I talk to find that adversarial review works best when you have a…