Structured prior-art hunt that runs BEFORE anything custom gets built — the "has someone already solved this?" reflex, done as a disciplined loop instead of a vague feeling. Fires WHENEVER about to scaffold a commodity-ish capability from scratch, even if the user only said "build X": e.g. a rate limiter, auth/SSO flow, parser, job queue or scheduler, cache, retry/backoff logic, diff engine, template engine, config loader, migration runner, event bus, feature-flag system, notification/email pipeline, webhook delivery, search/index layer, state machine, file/CSV/PDF pipeline, dedupe engine, changelog generator, i18n layer (illustrative, not exhaustive). Also fires on: "let's build", "I'll write a script/tool/library that", "we need a", "implement a", "create a subsystem/service for", "is there something that already does X", "has anyone solved X", "don't reinvent the wheel", "should I roll my own or use a library", new-dependency or new-subsystem proposals. Runs proportional-depth (quick/standard/full) across
2026-07-19