assess

Assess: Categorical Evaluation Against Rubric

You are running the assess primitive — evaluating items against a rubric with categorical verdicts. Rubric: $ARGUMENTS

When to Use

• After gather or distill to categorize findings by severity, readiness, or goal-fit
• When the user asks to "evaluate", "judge", "categorize", or "triage" items
• To classify items into discrete buckets rather than numeric scores (use rank for numeric scoring)

Process

1. Find Items

Detect upstream pipe-format output in context. If none found, treat $ARGUMENTS as both rubric and item source — extract items directly.

2. Parse Rubric

Extract categories from $ARGUMENTS (e.g., "by severity: critical/warning/suggestion", "by goal-fit: answer/deepen/prune"). If no categories are specified, default to HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW priority.

Gate: Item count is non-zero and matches the upstream Items (N) count. If zero items were found, stop and report "no items to assess" rather than emitting an empty output.

3. Evaluate and Categorize

Assess each item against the rubric. Assign a categorical verdict with reasoning. Group items by category.

Gate: Every item has been assigned a category. No item left uncategorized. If any item lacked sufficient detail for categorization, assign the lowest-severity category and note the assumption in the summary.

4. Emit Categorized Output

Output in pipe format. Items grouped by category (highest severity first), each prefixed with verdict in bold (e.g., CRITICAL — detail). Include a ### Rubric section (categories and definitions) between Items and Summary.

Guidelines

• Group items by category — all CRITICAL items together, then WARNING, etc.
• Each item's detail line starts with the verdict in bold (e.g., CRITICAL — detail)
• If items lack detail for evaluation, note assumptions in the summary