Blind Grader with Isolated Context

Problem

When the evaluator can see the producer's full reasoning trace, it tends to inherit the producer's framing and rationalise the artefact rather than evaluate it on its own merits. The producer's chain of thought makes mistaken choices look deliberate, and the evaluator ends up agreeing with the very priming that caused the mistake. The errors a fresh, uninformed reader would notice immediately are exactly the ones the trace-aware evaluator misses. Routing to a different model family is expensive and does not reliably break the priming, because the framing leaks through the trace itself rather than through any shared weights.

Solution

When the producer finishes, the orchestrator allocates a new context window (a new conversation, a new agent invocation, a new prompt instance) and constructs a grader call that contains only the artefact and the rubric. The producing agent's reasoning chain, scratchpad, and prior turns are deliberately excluded. The grader is instructed to judge against the rubric on its own terms and to flag what is missing or wrong. The grader's output is logged against the artefact and against the producer's trace for audit, but the grader itself was blind to the trace at decision time. The same model may be used as both producer and grader — context isolation is the load-bearing element, not a different model.

When to use

• Producer self-critique has a known echo-chamber failure mode on the task.
• A precise rubric can be written that does not require the producer's reasoning.
• The artefact is self-contained enough to grade on its own.