fix(marketing): a signer named in the request wins over every default

[jgleal]

Why

Alma asked Mercuria for "la tercera entrega de la serie de artículos sobre employent firmada por Felipe Polo". The production logs show generate_content with signer: "Felipe Polo" and no drop, so Felipe's tone file was in the prompt. The draft still came out in institutional "nosotros", with nobody speaking: blog-post-create files a chapter of the "Building our Employents" series as corporate content with no individual signer, and nothing let the request override it.

Every place that decided the signer without the request

Where	Default	Conflict with a named signer
blog-post-create, Single-author	the requester signs	Alma passes material for Felipe
blog-post-create, Step 3	presence, value, initiator; propose and ask	the request already said who
blog-post-create, External-person	Case B/C pick by role or activity	same
blog-post-create, Corporate / institutional	series chapters, announcements, positioning: "nosotros", no signer	what happened here
tone, 1b	"initiator or most senior"	also disagrees with Step 3's order, in the same prompt
blog-post-review, checklist	flags anyone but initiator or most senior	would flag the requested signer

What changes

• blog-post-create opens with "The requested signer", before every default it overrides: the named person signs. Still applies: the signer is an Orbitant employee (taken as one unless the request or material says otherwise; never sign as an external person), Case A asks about framing only, the Notion strategy governs anything about Mercuria or the Employents line, and the signer's tone file loads.
• The piece must read as theirs: the signer's first person singular visible at least in the opening and the closing. A draft whose only first person is "nosotros" has dropped the signer.
• When the signer did not produce the material, the singular carries their reading, judgement and recommendation; what others did stays attributed to them or to the team, and nothing is invented to make the voice personal.
• Each default names the override where it lives. tone defers to the request, then to the channel skill, then to its old rule. The review checklist checks the requested signer and flags "nosotros" under a named one.

Measured

Free probe on deepseek-v4-flash (NaN) with the real writer prompt (buildWriterInstructions, signer "Felipe Polo", tone file loaded) and Alma's request shape, opening and closing paragraphs only, 3 runs per version: the signer's first person singular appears in 0 of 3 on 1.9.0 and 3 of 3 on this branch ("Creo que…", "Mi recomendación es…"), with the team's actions still in plural. Indicative only: three runs, and the production writer is Sonnet, not deepseek.

PATCH 1.9.0 -> 1.9.1, meta 1.4.0 -> 1.4.1, and the three skills' frontmatter. Validators pass.

Second commit: Alma's other thread

Asked to "aplicar el tono de Felipe Polo a este post", Mercuria kept the engineering framing through eight revisions and a regeneration. Part of that is the harness (the tone file never loaded in that thread; fixed in orbitant-employents). Two parts are the brain:

• Editing Discipline forbids touching anything not requested, and it governs every round on an existing draft, so a change of signer, voice or angle came out as a light edit. It now says such a change is a rewrite: from the original material when there is one, the previous draft only as a record of what the reviewer accepted, with The requested signer applied as for a first draft.
• Nothing told the writer to ask for what only the signer can supply. The requested signer now says: no generic first-person filler; open the handoff note with the questions for the signer, as a gap in technical depth already is. Felipe's profile gets section 2b: his position, at least one business figure, and whose decision it was, with example questions, and item 0 of the pre-delivery check.

Unmeasured: the probe above predates this commit.

Third commit: Alma's review

Marketing's changes, as Alma sent them:

• Editing Discipline: a rewrite keeps the previous draft's facts and links only. Structure, H2s and assets carry over only if they pass the signer's tone file: the wrong angle of the npm post lived in its H2s.
• Ask before drafting (blog-post-create and Felipe's section 2b): when the signer's position, figures or decisions are missing, ask the requester in the thread and write with the answers; if unavailable, mark each gap inline as [PENDIENTE <NOMBRE>: …]. The pre-delivery check asks whether the questions were asked and answered.
• blog-post-review gets a signer tone checklist (for Felipe: one business idea per H2, at most two technical specifics, no negate-then-assert, no unbacked "decidí…", no open [PENDIENTE FELIPE], a closing rule).

In Claude Code and Cowork these work as written. In Mercuria two need harness support, tracked in orbitant-employents: the writer cannot post questions and wait (today it can only decline with one sentence), and the review and translation skills cannot read a tone file that lives in blog-post-create.

Fourth commit: "no es X, es Y" and calques (Alma, 2026-10-13)

Production (brain 1.10.0, Felipe's tone file loaded) wrote the npm post with the ban broken in the H1, two H2s and about eight body sentences, plus calques Alma flagged in the thread.

• felipe-polo.md 2.4 said he "defines concepts by contrast" with nothing on how; each side is now stated affirmatively, naming the fatal rule. The table's accepted principle line ("…, no el de la primera") was itself the pattern; replaced.
• blog-post-create: the ban lists its variants and says what to do when the material phrases an idea that way ("a label, not a guarantee" came straight from the Notion notes). The final pass's escape clause no longer covers it.
• tone: "Not translated". Write from the material's ideas, not its sentences; the listed calques are examples, not the boundary; ordinary Spanish editing applies unlisted.

Measured with the voice battery on the npm post's material, signer Felipe Polo, counting negate-then-assert lines with a regex (candidates read by hand):

Model	Brain	Drafts	Lines
deepseek-v4-flash	1.9.0 + tone file	10	10
deepseek-v4-flash	this branch	10	4
claude-sonnet-5	1.9.0 + tone file	1	7 (H1 included)
claude-sonnet-5	this branch	2	0 and 3

Fewer, not none: on Sonnet the pattern still slips into the body. Small samples (1.56 USD of Sonnet).

Merge of main

The branch was at 1.9.1 while main shipped 1.10.0 (#77). Version-only conflicts, resolved as a new minor: plugin 1.11.0, meta 1.6.0, blog-post-create 1.6.0, tone 1.2.0.

Matteo's tone file

Alma's profile for Matteo di Paolantonio as references/tones/matteo-di-paolantonio.md, the path Mercuria derives from his name, listed beside Felipe's in blog-post-create, blog-post-translate and the review's signer checklist (for Matteo, section 8 of his file is the checklist). The file's "Open points" section is left out, as it asks. A second commit applies the feedback from the thread where Alma shared it: the neural network quote names the network, the "Gandalfear" quote and the public apology about Vercel go, and the list of sources (Slack, internal talks, interviews) becomes one line, since the repo is public. Same 1.11.0.

https://claude.ai/code/session_01RwnqgsPLXtvAy3hVeZG3h7