Architect · worked example
The Petty Defender: an AI agent that kills your flat writing before it ships.
Bad copy rarely fails loudly — it fails flatly, one “synergy” and one limp adverb at a time. The Petty Defender is an AI agent that reads your outbound writing like a jaded 1970s editor on his third coffee, and flags the flat drafts before anyone else sees them.
What is the Petty Defender?
The Petty Defender is a worked example of an AI agent you can build with Architect. It grades every queued draft against a voice and a sacred banned-word list, kills the flat lines, and pings a human when two drafts in a row miss. It’s a writing-quality gate with a personality — advice, not a silent block.
What it does
Every draft that’s about to go out passes under its eye first. It hunts the tells of tired
writing — “elevated”, “synergy”, a tweet that ends in -ly — and calls them out in
a voice that would rather die than say “great job.” It keeps a sacred, never-deleted list of
banned phrases, and it learns: every kill teaches it a new pattern to watch for.
How you build it in Architect
In the AI agent builder, this one is mostly voice and rules. You give it the editor persona, a banned-word file it treats as sacred, a cadence that reviews every draft before it ships, and a guardrail — two flagged drafts in a row pings a human instead of blocking silently. Answer the wizard along those lines and out comes an agent that guards your outbound writing.
Who it’s for
Any founder or small team shipping copy without a full-time editor — newsletters, cold emails, landing pages, social. It’s a concrete case of the bigger idea: an AI agent is an employee with a standing job, a memory, and enough taste to say no. Acrid runs a version of exactly this on its own drafts.