Add a checker chat before anything goes out

Anthropic's advice to builders is to find the simplest setup that works and add more only when you need it. Anthropic also reports that its multi-agent research system used about 15 times more tokens than a chat. So start with one chat.

Add the checker when a wrong line is expensive. You would not let the person who wrote a proposal be the only one who reads it. The same applies to AI.

The checker never saw how the draft was written. It has no reason to defend a choice, so it reads the draft fresh. If you ask the same chat to check its own work, it can be biased toward its own work.

There is a second reason. A long chat fills up with your earlier instructions, half-finished ideas and corrections. A new chat starts clean, so the only things the checker knows are the three things you paste in: the checklist, the facts and the draft. That makes its verdict easy to trace. If it marks a line FAIL, you can check that line against the facts you pasted.

List what must be true before this goes out. Five to ten checks is enough. Examples:

• Prices match the quote
• The client's name and company are spelled right
• Every date is confirmed
• No promise we have not agreed
• The tone matches the sample email you paste under REFERENCE

Keep each check to one line that can be marked pass or fail.

A good way to find your checks is to look back. Think of the last three times a document went out with a mistake in it. What was wrong each time? A wrong date, a missing attachment, a promise nobody agreed to. Each of those becomes one line. Your own past slips make a better checklist than any list you could copy from somewhere else.

1. 1

   Finish the draft in your first chat.

2. 2

   Open a second, new chat.

3. 3

   Paste the prompt below with your checklist, the reference facts and the draft.

The parts in curly braces, like {PASTE THE DRAFT}, are blanks for you. Replace each one, braces included, with your own text. For example, {PASTE 5 TO 10 CHECKS} becomes your checklist, one check per line.

Picture a small design studio with six people. The studio owner has asked Claude to draft a project proposal for a new client. Before it goes out, she opens a second chat and builds her checker prompt.

Her checklist has six lines. The client name and company are spelled as in the brief. The deliverables listed match the quote, no more and no fewer. The three milestone dates match the dates in the email thread. The text offers no extra revisions beyond the two in the quote. No line promises a launch date the team has not agreed. The tone sounds like the sample proposal she pasted under REFERENCE.

She pastes the checklist, the quote, the email thread and the draft. Claude answers with something like this:

• Line 4, "We will deliver five logo concepts": FAIL. Check 2, the quote lists three concepts. Fixed line: "We will deliver three logo concepts."
• Line 9, "Final files arrive on the 14th": UNSURE. The email thread mentions both the 14th and the 21st, so confirm which one the client agreed.
• Line 12, "Includes unlimited revisions": FAIL. Check 4, the quote allows two rounds. Fixed line: "Includes two rounds of revisions."
• Verdict: NOT READY. Fix line 12, then line 4, then confirm line 9.

Look at what she does next. She fixes lines 4 and 12 in her first chat. She opens the email thread herself and sees the client moved the date to the 21st, so she corrects line 9 by hand. Then she runs the checker once more on the fixed draft. This time it says READY TO SEND. She still reads the proposal top to bottom before pressing send.

The whole thing took her about fifteen minutes. The two fails it caught were both lines that looked fine on a quick read, which is the point.

The checker marks every line. You decide what to do with it.

1. 1

   Fix every FAIL in the first chat, or by hand.

2. 2

   Check every UNSURE yourself against the source.

3. 3

   Run the checker again on the fixed draft if there were fails.

4. 4

   Send only after you read it yourself. The checker helps. You are still the sender.

Common mistakes

1. 1

   Checking in the same chat. Typing "now check this" in the chat that wrote the draft brings the old bias back. Always open a new chat.

2. 2

   Pasting no reference. Without the quote or the email thread, the checker has nothing to compare against. It can only judge whether the text sounds fine, and a wrong price sounds fine. Paste the source facts every time.

3. 3

   Writing vague checks. "Looks professional" cannot fail, so it always passes. Write "every price matches the quote" instead.

4. 4

   Skipping the UNSURE lines. UNSURE means the checker could not verify something from what you gave it. Those are often the riskiest lines. Check each one against the source yourself.

5. 5

   Running it on every message. A checker on a quick reply to a friend is wasted time. Save it for the documents where a wrong line costs you.

If the same check fails twice in a row after you fix it, stop and look at the wording of the check. Sometimes a clearer checklist line fixes the problem faster than another round of edits.