lit-pm

What it does

lit-pm is a Tier 1 orchestrator that coordinates a nine-stage literature review pipeline. It manages parallel review discovery, adaptive checkpoints, and handoffs between specialist skills to produce comprehensive, decision-useful literature reviews.

How it works

It acts as the coordinator, not a specialist. It performs session setup and state management (Stage 0), creates an outline structure, and runs quality gates to ensure outputs meet criteria. It delegates workload to:

• literature-researcher (Stages 2, 3, 5: discovery and section writing)
• lit-synthesizer (Stages 4, 7: introduction and synthesis)
• fact-checker (Stages 6a, 6b: validation)
• editor (Stage 8: polish) It uses a 9-stage pipeline, with parallel execution in Stage 2, and a sequence of handoffs and checkpoints. It includes a pre-flight validation to ensure required skills exist and defines a session-based workflow with archival guidelines, directory creation, and archival_context in handoffs. It enforces quality gates at each stage (e.g., Stage 6a blocking checks, Stage 6b non-blocking validation, Stage 6c adversarial review, Stage 7 synthesis checks) and manages a potential Devils-Advocate stage (Stage 6c and 7.5). The workflow includes a handoff protocol, session_dir creation, and archival-guidelines output. If a required specialist is unavailable, it aborts with an explicit error message.

When to use it

Use lit-pm for internal research synthesis, literature surveys, comprehensive reviews for grant proposals or scientific documents, cross-domain literature, or high-stakes deliverables requiring thoroughness and accuracy.

What it can touch

It dispatches tasks to these tools/skills via Task tool (for parallel and coordinated actions) and Skill tool (for loading domain knowledge if needed). It requires the following skills to exist: requirements-analyst, literature-researcher, lit-synthesizer, fact-checker, editor, devils-advocate.

Caveats

Pipeline duration is 4-24 hours. Requires all dependent skills to be present; missing skills abort with an explicit error: "ERROR: Required skill '{skill}' not found. lit-pm requires all dependencies. See references/stage-specifications.md for skill details." It delegates all specialist work to the appropriate tools and does not perform literature search, writing, verification, or editing itself. Archival handling defaults to a fallback if archival metadata is malformed or missing. Session directories are cleaned up only after successful completion; otherwise they are retained for debugging with a path logged to the user.