Use when a research idea, vague comparison, or surprising observation must be turned into a falsifiable, prereg-ready hypothesis before any benchmark, eval, training, or judge-backed work begins.
Use when starting a research, eval, benchmark, or empirical comparison session - explains how to activate Epistemic skills, choose stage skills, and enforce research gates before any experiment work.
Use when starting or continuing empirical/ML research, evals, benchmarks, or any "is X better than Y?" claim — the umbrella mechanism that enforces hypothesis → preregistration → baseline → experiment → statistical rigor → falsification → kill-or-ship → verification, with gates you self-enforce.
Use when a claim, result, or draft compares your system against an external baseline, published paper number, or competitor result and you need a sourced local reproduction before quoting it.
Use when a preregistered hypothesis is ready to run and you must generate provisional evidence under the locked method without contaminating headline outputs.
Use when a hypothesis has reached a real decision point and you must choose KILL, PIVOT, RECOMMIT, REFINE, or SHIP from repository evidence.
Use when a hypothesis is concrete enough to freeze the experiment contract, lock the judge and compute environment, and scaffold the run before any experiment-shaped command executes.
Use when completed experiment outputs exist in `experiments/{id}/smokes/` and the agent must decide whether an inferential claim is statistically defensible before falsification review or promotion.