I built two systems this year that try to solve the same problem from opposite directions. PlannerCritic puts an LLM critic in a loop with a deterministic gate layer. The gates own the safety contract. The critic is advisory. A planner decomposes a goal into a typed plan. A critic audits every subtask. The plan is revised until approval — or escalated to a human. AdversarialDebate puts two LLMs in a structured debate. The protocol owns the independence. The models are the evidenc...