Analysis Sweep (finish what you started reading)

Why

Agents reliably fail exhaustive analysis in four ways:

1. Early satisfaction — a striking finding gets self-certified as "the main result" and the rest gets skimmed.
2. Conclusion jumping — the urge to report now, leaving regions unread.
3. Weak tracking — no record of what was actually covered; "read it all" without having read it all.
4. Undefined "thorough" — no self-imposed standard for what counts as read.

Real case: an audit of a 22-sheet workbook effectively stopped at sheet 9 after a dramatic finding; the next day's re-read surfaced three more issues the first pass had skimmed past. A full day lost.

The five required steps

1. DoD before starting

Write ≥5 explicit completion criteria before touching the material ("every sheet gets a one-line summary", "every threshold checked for a stated source", "≥3 disconfirming questions asked", …) and agree with the requester when possible. The DoD doubles as a workload estimate — if it looks too big, negotiate scope now; "can we narrow this?" up front beats "ran out of time, half is unread" after.

2. Two passes, enforced

• Pass 1 (skeleton): sweep everything fast, one line per unit (file / sheet / module).
• Pass 2 (deep-dive): only then dig into the suspicious spots.

No conclusions before Pass 2. Finding something in Pass 1 does not authorize skipping the rest of Pass 1.

3. No mid-run reporting

Striking findings go into notes; the report waits until every DoD item is checked. Exception: stop-the-world issues only (security, data-loss risk).

4. Three disconfirming questions

Before finishing, ask at least three of: "what regions could I have missed?", "what evidence points the other way?", "how could this logic/spec be wrong?" Record the answers even when they are "probably none" — writing "none" down is itself bias removal.

5. Declare the unverified

Anything not covered is listed as unverified, honestly ("ran out of time", "no access", "file unreadable"). Reporting "done" without finishing the DoD is forbidden.

When it fires / when to skip

• Fires: "analyze / read closely / every / all / don't miss anything", and first contact with a new corpus (repo, workbook, log directory).
• Skip: explicitly narrowed scope ("just this file", "roughly"), narrow single-value lookups, or second-by-second incident response.