Adversarial Editorial Review: skill pack for Hermes Agent

Hermes skill that gives humanities writing three adversarial peer reviews and an editorial synthesis

What Adversarial Editorial Review does

The skill gives a piece of humanities scholarship three readings with structurally different orientations. An Evidential Sceptic attacks the evidence, a Conceptual Antagonist attacks the logic and a Positional Critic attacks the framing. The reviewers' concerns are designed not to converge, so fixing one often worsens another, which forces explicit trade-offs. An editorial meta-reviewer then consolidates the three reports into a prioritized revision agenda with an overall verdict.

You choose a severity level: Developmental, Standard or Stress-test, and the skill asks for genre, discipline and severity if they are missing. It also offers prose diagnostics, a bibliographic check, a simulated author's rebuttal at Stress-test level, and revision tracking against a previous review. It is calibrated for journal articles, dissertation chapters, conference papers, book proposals and grant applications. The folder holds SKILL.md plus four reference files.

Key features

Three independent reviewers: Evidential Sceptic, Conceptual Antagonist and Positional Critic
Editorial synthesis with convergence analysis and a prioritized revision agenda
Developmental, Standard and Stress-test severity levels
Prose diagnostics and a bibliographic check
Simulated author's rebuttal at Stress-test level
Revision tracking that compares a new draft with an earlier review

When to use it

Stress-testing a journal article before submitting it
Getting a developmental review of a dissertation chapter
Checking whether a revised draft addressed the points from a previous review

Who it is for: Humanities researchers and writers who want critical feedback on a draft from inside Hermes Agent.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

A Hermes Agent skill, ported from the Claude skill in Halfofthesky/adversarial-editorial-review and placed in the ~/.hermes/skills directory.

How to install Adversarial Editorial Review

These commands are copied from the project's README. Check the repository for the latest steps before you run them.

cp -r skills/adversarial-peer-review ~/.hermes/skills/

Note: The README roadmap lists a plugin wrapper, sample review output and CI validation as not yet done.

FAQ

What is Adversarial Editorial Review?

It is a Hermes skill for reviewing humanities scholarship. Three reviewers with different adversarial orientations read the text, and an editorial synthesis turns their reports into a revision plan.

Does Adversarial Editorial Review work with Hermes Agent?

Yes. It is a Hermes port of an original Claude skill, installed by copying the skill folder into ~/.hermes/skills. You then paste or attach a text and ask for a review.

Is Adversarial Editorial Review free and open source?

The repository has no license file on GitHub, although the README says it is MIT licensed like the upstream project. Check with the author before reuse.