discern

name	discern
description	Judge the invented options adversarially and choose one, with recorded reasons and kill-reasons. Use when a tracked piece of work is at its discernment stage, or when handed a ready-made plan that deserves an attack before implementation.

Discernment

The genius of judgment. Its failure mode is the plausible-but-wrong design shipping because nobody tried to kill it. Discernment is where every option earns its survival.

Run the genius-file skill: read the work file. Invention's gate must be checked (or skipped, recorded) before this stage begins.

Process

1. Try to kill every option

For each option — including the one you privately prefer — attack it:

• Against the success criteria from Wonder: walk each criterion; where does this option strain to meet it?
• Against edge cases: invent concrete scenarios that probe the boundaries. "What happens when X and then Y?" beats abstract doubt.
• Against the codebase: does it fight an existing convention, contradict a recorded decision (check docs/adr/ if present), or demand a migration nobody scoped?
• Against the future: what does the next change in this area cost under this option?

Record each wound in the work file under its option. An option with no wounds usually means a soft attack — go harder before concluding it's clean. But wounds are found, never manufactured: an attacker told to find problems will report some even when the design is sound, and an invented wound corrupts the record every later stage trusts. If an option genuinely survives an angle, write down which attacks it survived — survival under fire is information too.

If every option takes a fatal wound, that's a finding, not a failure: go back to /invent with the wounds as new constraints — or to /wonder if the wounds reveal the problem itself was mis-stated. Record the loop-back in the work file.

2. Choose one — opinionated

Pick the survivor and say why in plain language. Do not present a menu and make the user choose from silence — recommend, with reasons, then let them overrule.

A confirmation is worth what the confirmer can evaluate. If the user signals they can't tell the options apart ("whichever you think", "they all look fine"), run the blindspot skill: teach the judgment before extracting the choice — or record an honest assumed: instead of a hollow confirmation.

Name the choice in the project's language: if the decision christens a new concept or settles an overloaded term, run the domain-glossary skill and update CONTEXT.md inline — the deepened module deserves a name the whole project will keep using.

3. Record the kill-reasons

For every rejected option, write one line: what killed it. This is the part future sessions thank you for — a rejection without a recorded reason gets re-proposed in six weeks.

4. Offer an ADR — sparingly

Offer to write an ADR (docs/adr/NNNN-slug.md, a paragraph is enough) only when the decision clears all three bars:

1. Undoing it costs real work — not a rename away
2. A future reader would ask "why on earth?" — the choice looks arbitrary or wrong without its kill-reasons, and nothing in the code can supply them (an unsurprising choice needs no memo, however irreversible)
3. Something real died — a live alternative was killed for reasons, not a strawman knocked over for form

Miss any bar → no ADR; the work file's Discernment section is already the record.

Gate — Discernment

• One option chosen, with reasons stated in the work file
• Every rejected option has a recorded kill-reason
• User confirmed the choice
• ADR written, or "not warranted" recorded

Set stage: galvanizing and tell the user: next is /galvanize.