/draft-marker-discipline

name: draft-marker-discipline
description: >-
  Use when a manuscript is being drafted across many sessions and needs auditable open-question tracking: in-source draft markers with distinct jobs, triage of open items by what would actually resolve each one, word counts that exclude draft apparatus, safe archival of superseded material, and assertion-guarded scripted edits. Load before doing a batch pass over TODO markers or before quoting a manuscript's length.

Draft Marker Discipline

Overview

A manuscript written across many sessions accumulates open questions. Where those questions live determines whether the draft is auditable or merely long.

Kept in chat, they evaporate at the end of the session. Kept in a separate issue list, they drift out of sync with the sentence they belong to. Kept in the source next to the claim, they survive, they travel with the text, and they can be counted.

This skill covers the marker system, the triage that makes a marker count meaningful, the measurement that makes a length claim honest, and the two mechanical traps that have each cost a real build.

When To Use

Use this skill when:

• a manuscript is drafted across sessions, by several people, or by agents
• you are about to do a batch pass over open markers
• you are about to quote the manuscript's length
• superseded material needs to be removed from the tree
• you are about to make the same edit across many files with a script

Do not use this skill for:

• deciding whether a claim's source supports it. That is

`claim-source-verification`; this skill is the bookkeeping around it.

• restructuring an unstable argument. That is `manuscript-optimizer`.

1. Four Markers, Four Jobs

\TODO{...}        red     an unresolved FACTUAL or SOURCING question
\note{...}        blue    editorial, addressed to the authors
\directive{...}   boxed   what must change in this passage, and why
\superseded{...}  grey    text a freeze decision replaced, kept not deleted

All four vanish under a draft-mode switch, so a clean copy for circulation is one boolean away.

**The discipline is the restriction on `\TODO`.** It carries factual and sourcing questions only, never style notes, never "tighten this", never "consider rephrasing". Style goes in `\note`; a required change goes in `\directive`.

The payoff is that the `\TODO` count becomes a readiness metric rather than a mixed bag. "Thirty-seven open TODOs" means thirty-seven unresolved factual questions, which is a statement about the manuscript's evidentiary state. If style notes are mixed in, the number means nothing and stops being reported.

**`\superseded` earns its place** by making "nothing is deleted silently" cheap. Replaced text stays visible in draft mode, greyed, so a reader can see what a freeze decision changed without going to version control.

2. Triage By Resolution Route, Not By Topic

"Do the TODOs" is not one task. Sorting them by section tells you where they are; sorting them by **what would actually resolve each one** tells you which are work you can do now, which need money, and which need a person.

Five routes:

| Route | Meaning | | --- | --- | | **A. Open retrieval** | Answerable from the public literature. An agent or a search can close it. | | **B. Paid or restricted text** | Needs a purchased standard, a paywalled full text, or a vendor document. | | **C. Team or author decision** | Not a fact. Someone has to decide. | | **D. Proprietary data** | Needs data that exists but is not accessible. | | **E. The evidence does not exist** | The resolution is a sentence that states what the evidence is, with its provenance ("an estimate from <source>"), not a confession of what is missing. |

Route E is a real outcome, not a failure. In one Review, a widely-quoted market share traced to a conference talk and a newspaper report with no survey behind either. The resolution was to report it as an estimate and name its provenance, which is a better sentence than the confident one it replaced.

Sort by route and the shape of the remaining work becomes visible: in the run above, roughly two thirds were route A, about a fifth route B, and a handful routes C to E. That is a plan. "Thirty-nine TODOs" is not.

**Flag single points of failure.** When one inaccessible document is the only thing blocking a whole subsection, say so in the triage file by name. It is the item most worth spending money on and it is invisible in a flat list.

3. The Counting Trap

Report the actionable count, not the raw grep count.

The noun form, used to typeset the word inside a sentence that talks about markers, matches the same pattern as a real marker:

grep -o '\\TODO{' sections/*.tex | wc -l    # 39
grep -n '\\TODO{}' sections/*.tex           # the 2 noun-form uses, not work

Two out of thirty-nine is a 5% overstatement, which sounds harmless until the number appears in a status report and someone plans against it. Print both, and say which is which.

The same applies to any count quoted from a grep. Show the command next to the number so the next person can re-derive it instead of trusting it.

4. Word Count Must Exclude The Apparatus

Measured once, on one Review at one point in its drafting: a bare `wc -w` over the section `.tex` files returned about **19,900** words, and the prose a reader actually reads was about **14,300**. The gap was markup, the four draft markers, and six figure legends of roughly 200 words each.

The ratio is not a constant and yours will differ. What generalises is the direction and the consequence: the inflated number made that Review look far over length and would have invited cutting prose that was not the problem. This is not a rounding issue; it is a measurement that points at the wrong fix.

Strip, before counting:

• **whole figure environments, legends included.** A legend is the display item's

word budget, not the section's. Charging a 200-word legend to the section that carries