The dangerous case is not "no oracle" — it is a WEAK oracle you falsely believe is exact. Before trusting any test suite, metric, benchmark, eval, or proof as if it settled the question, state explicitly what it CERTIFIES and what it does NOT — the gap…
Stop re-deriving from zero every session. At the close of any non-trivial work session, extract what RESISTED resolution — anomalies, reframes that failed, objections that survived, named-but-unfilled gaps, contested judgments, the unexplained core of a…
When the same awkward phrase keeps recurring — "the kind of bug where...", "this class of lines that...", "that pattern we keep tripping on but have no name for" — treat the repetition as residue signaling a missing concept. Coin a precise noun, give it a…
When the task is to set rules, incentives, or metrics — "how should we score this", "what policy makes agents tell the truth", "how do we reward the right behavior" — do not propose a rule and hope it induces the outcome. Start from the behavior you want as a…
When one narrative starts dominating early — a bug explanation, a market story, a user motive, "the obvious cause" — stop converging and force at least four live alternatives, each still consistent with what has been seen and each carrying a prediction that…
When a global attack stalls — the system is too coupled, the proof too wide, the rollout too distributed, the synthesis too brittle — stop pretending the whole thing must yield in one piece. Solve it on tractable patches, then compute exactly what fails on…
The universal pre-gate that wraps every other skill. Every cognitive move TRANSFORMS the problem — tests it, reframes it, localizes it, names it, formalizes it, dimensionalizes it, persists it — and the sharpest failure is not that the move is non-executable,…
Whenever you are tempted to say "done", "complete", "fully reviewed", "all sources covered", or "the migration is comprehensive", force the denominator into the open first. State the full space of cases, sources, branches, or entities under discussion, then…