| name | grindability |
| description | The green-light triage for any long or autonomous work — ask "what's the oracle?" AND "is it grindable?" before committing to the shape. Use at the moment of green-lighting any overnight or unattended run, fan-out, "keep marching" arc, soak, migration walk, bulk verification, or agent-loop dispatch. Also triggers when sizing why an autonomous run underperformed. Companion to fan-out (the parallel shape) and foreman (the staffing pattern). |
grindability — the oracle's twin
Example skill. The triage below is model-agnostic; copy it into your own skills and
rename freely. The pattern matters more than the name.
Verifiable isn't the bar — grindable is. An oracle tells you whether an attempt
succeeded; grindability is whether you can afford many attempts: cheap, deterministic,
side-effect-free retries — a sandbox you can reset, a test you can rerun, a build you can
throw away. Autonomy compounds exactly where both hold. Where each attempt touches the
world (rate limits, live sites, sends, spends, one-shot state), no oracle quality makes
long unattended grinding safe. The canonical contrast: a test suite in a resettable
sandbox is grindable; a rate-limited live site is not — no matter how good the check.
The two questions, asked together
- What's the oracle? The deterministic check that says pass/fail without you
(build/test/lint/diff/exit-code).
- Is it grindable? Can attempt N+1 run immediately after attempt N failed, at ~zero
cost, with no residue? (Reset-able sandbox · replayable input · idempotent target ·
no external quota/party in the loop.)
The four quadrants → what each green-lights
| oracled | no oracle |
|---|
| grindable | ★ Let it run — autonomous goal loops, overnight runs, fan-out, retry-until-green. This is where autonomy compounds. | Build the oracle first — the detector is the actual first task; grinding without one just launders guesses. |
| ungrindable | Human-cadence checkpoints: act in small verified steps, surface between them. The oracle helps judge each step, but retries are expensive/dirty, so no unattended loops. (Deploys, live-DB migrations, anything where a probe against the live system is the only proof.) | Don't automate. Do it by hand with eyes on, or reshape the task until it moves quadrants. |
Raising grindability is usually the real first task
Most "ungrindable" work is one artifact away from grindable — and building that artifact
beats grinding carefully:
- Live system → scratch container / disposable replica you can rebuild and replay
against
- One-shot state → replay file / fixture / seeded world (e.g., a headless game
driver replaying a recorded run)
- External API with quotas → recorded fixtures for the loop; the real call only at
the final verify (the verify-on-the-real-path rule still applies to the last run)
- Prod-only reproduction → capture the failing input once, grind against the capture
- Costly model calls → grind the harness with a local/cheap model; the premium model
only for the final pass
If no such artifact is buildable, that's the signal the work belongs on the human's
cadence — which is a scheduling fact, not a failure.
The companion mechanism: entropy collapse
Long solo grinding degrades: an autoregressive model marinating in its own prior outputs
loses diversity (each attempt more like the last — the same wrong idea, retried politely).
The fix lives at the prompt level, not the sampler: fresh eyes per attempt (fan-out),
or opposed mandates (one attempt told to attack what the previous defended). This is
why council beats solo, and why the fan-out skill's
fresh-context-per-unit shape out-performs one tiring serial operator on grindable work.
Applying it (30 seconds at green-light)
- Name the oracle. None? → building it is step 1 (or the work isn't autonomous yet).
- Name the reset. "How do I cheaply undo/rerun attempt N?" No answer? → name the
artifact that would create one, or drop to human-cadence checkpoints.
- Pick the shape: grindable+oracled → autonomous loop / fan-out / overnight; add opposed
mandates if attempts will iterate on each other.
- Say the classification out loud in the green-light message — "grindable+oracled
(sandbox X, oracle Y), letting it run" — so the shape is auditable.
In one line
Before you turn anything loose, ask both questions together: what's the oracle, and can
it grind? Autonomy compounds only where both are yes.
