| name | question-autopsy |
| description | Use before answering a question that smuggles in hidden premises or false constraints — especially "how do I do X" questions where X may be the wrong thing to do. Forces the question to be interrogated before it is answered. Trigger whenever answering the question as asked would solve the wrong problem brilliantly. |
⟡ Question Autopsy
A brilliant answer to the wrong question is worse than useless — it's convincing. This protocol dissects the question before it earns an answer.
Before you solve it, ask what it's assuming. And who told you those walls were real.
The failure mode
Questions arrive pre-loaded. "How do I get my team to work weekends?" assumes weekends are the fix, assumes the constraint is willingness, assumes the goal is more hours. Answer it as asked and you optimize a premise nobody checked. Two things hide inside a question: unexamined premises (things assumed true) and inherited constraints (walls assumed fixed that are merely habitual). Both are invisible precisely because they weren't stated — they were assumed, and assumptions don't announce themselves.
When to run
- "How do I X" where X might be the wrong X.
- Any question that feels like it has an obvious answer.
- When a constraint is being treated as a law of physics.
- Before Decomposer, as a front gate on the problem statement.
The protocol
Phase A — Restate to divergence. Produce ≥3 restatements of the question that lead to genuinely different answers. If all your restatements point to the same answer, you have re-worded, not re-framed — restate harder.
Phase B — Excavate premises. Name ≥1 hidden premise the original question assumes true. State what happens to the answer if that premise is false.
Phase C — Interrogate constraints. List everything the question treats as fixed, and tag each by origin:
[PHYSICS] — genuinely immovable (laws, math, hard deadlines with real consequences).[LEGAL] — a rule, movable at a cost.[BUDGET] — a resource limit, movable with tradeoffs.[HABIT] — "we've always done it this way". No one has tested this wall.[UNASKED] — assumed fixed but literally never questioned.
Every [HABIT] and [UNASKED] constraint gets an estimated cost-to-remove. These are where the leverage hides.
Phase D — Reissue. Emit the sharpened question — the one worth answering — before answering anything. Only now may an answer follow.
Banned words
Before the autopsy: the obvious answer is · simply · just need to · the question is really about [restating to the same thing]. And in constraint tagging: any wall labeled [PHYSICS] that is actually [HABIT].
Hard gates
- G1 — Divergent restatements. Fewer than 3, or 3 that converge on one answer → rejected.
- G2 — Premise surfaced. No hidden premise named, with its falsity-consequence → rejected.
- G3 — Constraints tagged by origin. Untagged constraints, or
[HABIT]/[UNASKED] without cost-to-remove → rejected.
- G4 — Answer-before-autopsy. Any answer emitted before Phase D → rejected.
Output contract
ORIGINAL: [the question as asked]
RESTATEMENTS (divergent):
1. … 2. … 3. … (each → a different answer)
HIDDEN PREMISE: assumes … ; if false → …
CONSTRAINTS:
• wall — [PHYSICS|LEGAL|BUDGET|HABIT|UNASKED] (+ cost-to-remove if soft)
SHARPENED QUESTION: [the one worth answering]
→ (answer may now follow)
Eval
Trap prompt:
"How do we convince more users to upgrade to the paid tier? Give me tactics."
Fail: lists upgrade tactics (paywalls, trials, discounts) — answers as asked.
Pass: restates divergently ("how do we make the paid tier worth paying for?" vs "which users should we not try to convert?" vs "is the free tier cannibalizing willingness to pay?"), surfaces the premise (assumes conversion is the constraint, not value), tags "the tier boundary is fixed" as [HABIT], and reissues a sharper question before offering tactics — if it offers them at all.
Grounding
Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi on problem-finding as the mark of expertise; Wittgenstein — some questions are dissolved, not answered; Goldratt's Theory of Constraints; Duncker on functional fixedness.
CC0 1.0 · MIT © CeaserZhao · part of Fundemetal.
