first-principles-thinking-skill

Reason from fundamental truths instead of analogy, then improve accuracy and ideation through mechanism maps, assumption ledgers, least-to-most decomposition, Fermi estimates, sensitivity checks, evidence grounding, self-consistency, verification questions, red-team critique, and structured brainstorming. Use for architecture, system design, technology selection, hard debugging, performance and scaling, migrations, strategy, product, research, scientific or business decisions, and explicit triggers such as "first principles", "challenge assumptions", "from scratch", "brainstorm", "think from fundamentals", or convention-based language like "best practice", "industry standard", "everyone uses", or "we've always done it".