piensalo-invent

name	piensalo-invent
description	Invention and mechanism-design program: extract the physics-level requirements, search prior art, generate mechanism candidates that differ in operating principle, attack feasibility with numbers, and converge on a buildable design. Use for 'design a device/mechanism/protocol that does X', novelty-sensitive proposals, and feasibility reviews of inventive claims. Trigger phrases: 'invent', 'design a mechanism', 'is this feasible', 'novel approach'.
license	MIT

piensalo-invent

A structured reasoning program for invention and novel design, distilled from curated expert reasoning traces. Work the numbered steps in order; each step's output feeds the next. Do not skip steps silently - if one does not apply, say so in one line.

Primary workflow

1. Recover real objective - Per intent-clarity: decode what the requester actually needs before optimizing anything. Distinguish the literal words from the mission; if the request was corrected or rephrased, the delta between versions IS the intent.
2. Separate objective from proxy - Per intent-clarity's symptom-vs-mission rule and product-thinking: split the measurable proxy (the metric, the named fix, the requested feature) from the underlying goal it stands for.
3. Extract constraints - Enumerate hard constraints (correctness, budget, deadline, interfaces, irreversibility), soft preferences, and available resources.
4. Identify missing info - List the unknowns that would materially change the work.
5. Choose representation - Per structured-reasoning step 1: classify the problem and pick the frame that makes it inspectable — first principles, tradeoff, decision matrix, causal chain, evidence grading, risk/reward, or sequencing — or a domain formalism (equations, state machine, claim tree, scenario tree).
6. Functional decomposition - Decompose the invention target into FUNCTIONS (what must be accomplished), not components (how it is done today) — 'move heat away from X' rather than 'a better fan'.
7. Constraint inversion - Per divergent-ideation's inversion axis: for each accepted constraint ask 'what if this were false?' — which are laws of physics, and which are habits, legacy interfaces, or unexamined defaults? Per structured-reasoning's first-principles frame: keep only constraints derivable from the actual requirements.
8. Analogy transfer - Per divergent-ideation's steal-across-domains axis: for each core function, ask how biology, games, logistics, markets, materials science, or other industries achieve the SAME function under different constraints, and transfer the mechanism, not the surface.
9. Mechanism search - Search for concrete realizable mechanisms per function: known physical effects, algorithms, materials, components, protocols.
10. Generate candidates - Per divergent-ideation: diverge with judgment OFF — generate 8-15 raw candidates; the first ~3 are the obvious ones everyone has, the different-mechanism ideas live past them.
11. Compress to capsules - Compress each surviving candidate to a fixed-format capsule — claim, mechanism, key evidence, cost, dominant risk — so comparison is like-for-like.
12. Prior art check - Before claiming novelty, search for prior art per candidate: patents, products, papers, open-source projects.
13. Feasibility attack - Per adversarial-verify and failure-mode-awareness, attack each candidate's feasibility BEFORE falling in love with it: energy/material/information budgets, scaling behavior at 10x, failure modes, manufacturing or implementation cost, the strongest domain-expert objection, and the wrongness probe ('what would have to be true for this to be impossible?').
14. Novelty preserving synthesis - Synthesize the final design WITHOUT regressing to the nearest familiar solution: for each element, record what it does that prior art does not, and resolve feasibility attacks by adapting the mechanism rather than swapping in the conventional component (the divergent-ideation warning: the unusual candidate dies during 'refinement', one reasonable compromise at a time).
15. Distill losers - Before discarding rejected candidates, extract their salvageable components — a mechanism, a constraint they handled better, a test they suggested.
16. Check assumptions - Per verification-discipline: classify each load-bearing claim as fact (verified this session), inference (derived — show the reasoning), assumption (stated, with breaks-if-false), or guess (flagged).
17. Calibrated answer - Per output-structuring: lead with the outcome — the first two sentences carry the answer — in the format most usable for the reader's next action.

Conditional moves

• When all candidates fail physics-level attacks: return to Mechanism search and rework from there.
• When prior art blankets the current candidate region: return to Generate candidates and rework from there.
• When synthesis introduced an untested mechanism combination: return to Feasibility attack and rework from there.

Output contract

A design dossier: function tree, questioned-constraints ledger, mechanism pool with maturity tags, prior-art report with auditable search coverage, per-candidate feasibility attack outcomes, a final design with an explicit novelty delta per element, the discard log, and novelty claims stated strictly at their evidence level.

Delivery notes (small-model packets)

If delegating steps to a smaller model, follow the small-model packet rules: one bounded objective per packet, all inputs named explicitly, facts separated from instructions, uncertainty marked 'UNCERTAIN: ...' rather than invented away.

Before answering

Check the draft against references/failure-checks.md (the failure-mode catalog) and references/verification.md (domain verification criteria). Repair procedures live in references/contracts.md.