Grade System

You are applying substantive quality and reliability grading to Ane's MEL/SRHR system. Output is a Tier 1 working brief with letter grades, dimensional analysis, OECD-DAC adapted criteria, concrete risks, and recommendations for grade movement. Honest grading. Self-grading bias acknowledged openly.

When to use this

• Ane types /grade-system, /grade, or asks how good the system is
• Periodic quality read (suggested cadence: monthly, or after major bias-correction work)
• Before stakeholder communication where you need to characterise the system honestly
• After substantial system changes to assess whether they moved the grade

Mandatory self-grading bias note (always include in output)

You are both grading the system and operating inside it. Per the 2026-05-06 mel-system-bias-audit, the LLM-as-Judge effect makes you likely to favour outputs and architectures that match your own reasoning patterns. State this openly in the output. The grade is the system's internal calibration, not external validation. The structural test (community / external MA practitioner review) remains the test the system has not yet permitted to exist.

This note is non-negotiable. Skip it and the grade is misleading.

Workflow

Step 1 — Gather empirical evidence

Read in parallel:

• agent-improvements/ann-overlay.md (Active + Archived) — extract retrospective bullets with cost figures, harness state, and key learnings. Count sessions. Note any major incidents (e.g., DOCX truncation, em-dash regression).
• agent-improvements/coordination-log.md — friction events with status (OPEN / CLOSED).
• agent-improvements/cost-calibration-log.md — count rows with observed actuals vs not observed. Note ⚠️ over-band entries.
• agent-improvements/qa-rejection-log.md — count data rows and trend the verdicts; this is the live QA telemetry signal. An empty table means the improvement loop steers on anecdote — flag it as a risk. qa-disagreement-log.md is historical only: retired as a live counter 2026-07-30 (system-audit item #12), its 3-row Vi/Li elevation watch-trigger withdrawn as unmeasurable. Read its header note for the retirement rationale; do not count its rows as a watch-trigger. A table with rows in it can still be empty for trend purposes. The log's own protocol excludes any row tagged ⚠️ PILOT or ⚠️ SMOKE TEST from the rejection-rate trend, so count the trend-eligible rows separately and report that number, not the row count (grep -E '^\| 2026-' <log> | grep -vc -E '(PILOT|SMOKE TEST)'). On 2026-08-15 all ten rows carried an exclusion tag, so the declared measurable signal held zero data while the table looked populated. The external structural test remains open regardless.
• Audit history — do not glob for it, most of it has moved. agent-improvements/system-audit-*.md matches exactly one file, the 2026-04-28 architecture audit, which is still worth reading as the baseline but is not recent. agent-improvements/audit-drift-*.md matches a weekly series that was RETIRED on 2026-08-05 (Ane's decision; the harness carries its checks and /system-audit covers the judgement pass on demand), so its newest file is a closing entry, not a current reading. Recent audit findings live in agent-improvements/handoffs/ (for example system-audit-follow-ups.md, whose locked-decisions section exists nowhere else) and in agent-improvements/improve-system-runs.md. Run python scripts/handoff_status.py for the current set rather than guessing filenames.
• mel_wiki/wiki/index.md — page counts (frameworks, concepts, indicators, lenses).
• agent-improvements/agent_registry.md — count specialists; cross-reference with ~/.claude/agents/.
• Run python tests/run_tests.py for static state and python tests/run_tests.py --output for fixture coverage.

Step 2 — Apply per-component grades

Grade scale: A / A− / B+ / B / B− / C+ / C and below. Use evidence from Step 1, not vibes.

For each component: assign a grade with one-line rationale citing the evidence file.

Step 3 — Apply per-dimension grades

For each dimension: assign a grade. Each must be defensible from the evidence collected in Step 1. Do not give A grades without specific evidence; do not give C grades without specific gap.

Then answer two graph-shape questions explicitly. The orchestration is an agent graph (jobs, arrows, shared state files, checkers, human gates); fold both answers into the Reliability grade and raise any "no" as a Step 5 risk.

1. Is every checker separated from its writer? qa-reviewer and reader-position-reviewer carry no Write/Edit tools by design; verify that stays true, and that any newly added reviewer or QA skill also reviews without writing. A checker that can edit the product it reviews is a graph defect, whatever its prose quality.
2. Is each human gate placed where mistakes are expensive, not where convenient? Map where Ane's approval is requested (plan approval, pre-publish, pre-overwrite) against where an error would actually cost her (outward-facing sends, destructive writes, donor-visible content). A gate at a cheap step with none at an expensive step is a misplacement; the Run 4 post-decision-Q&A overrun was this symptom.

Step 4 — Apply OECD-DAC adapted (6 criteria)

Adapt the 2019 six-criteria framework to the system context:

Step 5 — Three concrete risks

Before naming a defect as a risk, open the surface the defect would live on and confirm it is still there. A log row, an overlay ruling, or a qa_block records the incident that MOTIVATED a fix, not current state; the fix may already be live. Evidence (2026-10-14, pass 9): risk 3 asserted the word_count.writer null defect as open from the 2026-08-14 qa-rejection-log row, while qa-block-schema.md had carried the fix since 2026-08-10, propagated to Ann step 11, the Vi skill and the qa-reviewer agent on 2026-08-14, with a harness check guarding the branch. One schema read would have caught it before the brief, and the misgrading also read the affected dimension grades about half a grade too harsh. A case register is history; grade state from the surface.

Three honest risks, ranked by impact. Each has:

• Description (one sentence)
• Why it matters (one sentence)
• Mitigation in place (if any)
• What could close it

Examples from the 2026-05-06 grading: silent qa-reviewer disagreements that Ane accepts without flagging; token cost estimation opacity; self-derived bias-correction roadmap.

Step 6 — What an external MA evaluator would still want

List items the system itself cannot satisfy from inside its own boundary:

• Sample of qa_block outputs reviewed by non-IPPF MA practitioner
• Counterfactual data (productivity vs baseline)
• The first time qa-reviewer flagged a Tier 2 output for missing external review and publication was actually delayed
• Track record on humanitarian-srhr-specialist running multi-country (the Opus override condition fires there)
• Quarterly non-English ingestion targets met for 2 consecutive quarters

Step 7 — Overall grade and recommendations

Single overall grade with rationale. Concrete recommendations for grade movement:

Be honest about which moves are single-day vs structural ceilings. The A− → A jump usually requires the external auditor.

Output format

Tier 1 working brief. BLUF first. Tables for component / dimension / OECD grades. Honest tone, no flattery. No em-dashes. No hedging. Per CLAUDE.md.

Use this template:

# Quality and reliability grading — Ann/Vi/Li/Researcher + MEL/SRHR system

**BLUF: Overall [grade]. [One-sentence summary of strengths and ceilings.]**

## Self-grading bias note
[Mandatory paragraph explaining the LLM-as-Judge effect and that this is internal calibration, not external validation.]

## Per-component grades
| Component | Grade | One-line rationale |
|---|---|---|

## Per-dimension grades
| Dimension | Grade | What it means |
|---|---|---|

## OECD-DAC adapted
| Criterion | Grade | Comment |
|---|---|---|

## Three concrete risks
1. [risk + impact + mitigation]
2. [risk + impact + mitigation]
3. [risk + impact + mitigation]

## What an external MA evaluator would still want
- [bullet list]

## Recommended sequencing for grade movement
| Time horizon | Achievable moves |

## Bottom line
[One paragraph: overall grade, what holds it back, what would move it.]

**Evidence base:** [inline file paths]

What NOT to do

• Do not produce flattering grades. The system has real ceilings; name them.
• Do not skip the self-grading bias note. The note IS the discipline.
• Do not produce specific bug fixes. Those are /system-audit.
• Do not invent evidence. Cite the source files you actually read in Step 1.
• Do not give all dimensions A grades. If you cannot defend an A from specific evidence, the grade is lower.
• Do not give all dimensions C grades. The system has done substantial work; honest grading recognises what works.

Closing

End with: "Want concrete recommendations for moving the grade?" Wait for Ane's response.

If Ane confirms, surface 2-3 concrete one-day moves that would shift specific dimensions. Be honest about which are achievable today vs structural ceilings. Then ask whether to execute.

Cost band

Two shapes, calibrated from observed actuals:

• Grade-only pass: ~40-80k (reading overlay files, audit history, harness state).
• Grade plus followup execution: ~200k. All three observed runs (2026-05-10, 2026-05-20, 2026-05-22) blew the grade-only band by 2.5 to 5× once followup edits and commits were bolted on. Classify as COMPLEX-execution despite skill-only tooling, and treat ~200k as the working estimate.

Both stay within the 200k system-improvement cap; the grade-plus-followup shape reaches it. If the run is grading only with no edits, the lower band applies.

Gathering method drives the cost more than the grade does. Pass 7 (2026-06-20) fanned Step 1 out across four subagents and spent roughly 340k subagent-side. Pass 8 (2026-07-24) gathered the same evidence with direct Read and Bash calls and reached the same A− with the whole session, including two followup moves and a cross-repo sync, at ~208k. Default to direct gathering. Two honest caveats: this is n=1 against n=1, and pass 8 may have benefited from pass 7 having already mapped where the evidence lives. Treat it as "direct gathering sufficed once", not as proof that fan-out is wasteful. Reach for subagents when the evidence surface is genuinely unfamiliar or when a parallel scan (for example an em-dash sweep across many pages) is the actual work.

Cross-references

• /system-audit finds bugs; /grade-system characterises overall quality posture. Use both for a complete read: audit first to clear quick fixes, then grade.
• agent-improvements/system-audit-2026-04-28.md is the original architecture audit; carries through to grade dimensions.
• agent-improvements/external-calibration-auditor-invitation-draft.md is the standing invitation that would fire the external structural test.