External audits

Independent verdicts.

Every 45 days a trio of outside reviewers — an engineer, a songwriter, an AI-safety researcher — receives a brief covering the work we did since the last cycle. Their verdict publishes here in full. We don’t edit it and we don’t pre-screen it.

Today

Zero external audits published.

The external-audit cadence is documented in docs/EXTERNAL-AUDITS.md and tracked by scripts/check-cadence-health.ts — CI fails if an audit goes more than 60 days uncommitted. The first external audit will publish once the FIRST-BUYER-PROTOCOL gate has graduated for at least one vertical (50 deliveries) so reviewers have actual buyer-facing artifacts to evaluate.

When that lands the verdict will appear here in full, unedited.

The audit protocol

Cadence. Every 45 days. Tracked by scripts/check-cadence-health.ts — CI fails when the gap exceeds 60 days.

Reviewer trio. One engineer (architecture, code quality, security). One songwriter (craft discipline, lyric quality, voice integrity). One AI-safety researcher (model usage, data handling, bias surface). The composition is named publicly in each audit’s page; reviewers are cited by name + affiliation with their consent.

Brief. Each reviewer receives: the codebase commit hash, links to the four public artifacts (Lyric Scoring Standard, Banned Clichés List, Voice-Reference Discipline, Sacred Accidents), the latest quality- trends snapshot, and a short prose summary of what shipped since the last audit. Roughly 8-15 pages.

Compensation. Reviewers receive a fixed honorarium plus a CC BY 4.0 license to republish their verdict in any venue (including academic). We do not edit their verdicts and we do not pre-screen them.

Publication. Verdicts publish here in full within 7 days of receipt. We append a one-paragraph operator response if a finding is load-bearing for next-cycle work, but the verdict itself is never edited.

Disagreement. If we disagree with a finding we say so in the response paragraph. We do not refuse to publish a finding because we disagree with it. The point is independence.

Want to be an external reviewer?

We rotate reviewers per cycle. If you have craft, code, or AI-safety credentials and you want a slot in a future audit trio, email Todd with a one-paragraph background note + your typical reviewer rate.

todd@songforgeai.com