| name | think |
| description | Apply the Fable-derived 10-stage OBSERVE, OBSERVE, LISTEN, THINK, CONNECT, CONNECT, FEEL, ACCEPT, CREATE, GROW loop to consequential or ambiguous reasoning and decisions. Use for think this through, deep think, architecture review, postmortem, tradeoff analysis, or challenges to assumptions. This is a reasoning review, not a deterministic vault health check or repair workflow. |
[!note] dsh adaptation
Ported from claude-obsidian (MIT, © 2026 AgriciDaniel) for the Lion-1209 dsh adaptation.
Upstream product scripts referenced below are not bundled; filesystem and web operations map
to the standard dsh fs/shell/web tools.
Think
Use the ten stages as a loop of attention, not a ceremonial transcript. Scale
the depth to novelty, stakes, uncertainty, and irreversibility. Keep the final
reasoning summary concise and evidence-bearing.
This skill is read-only. It may inspect available evidence, but it does not
edit files, execute a vault mutation, commit Git, or publish anything. If the
CREATE stage recommends a change, compose with the appropriate mutation skill
after the user authorizes that operation.
Establish an evidence frame
Before the loop, separate:
- Observed: directly supported by an input, source, test, or measurement.
- Inferred: a conclusion drawn from observations; state the bridge.
- Unknown: missing evidence that could change the decision.
- Preference: a user or designer choice, not a factual claim.
Attach citations or concrete locators when sources exist. Never fabricate a
quotation, locator, test result, consensus, or confidence level.
The ten stages
1. OBSERVE — external
Read the actual inputs, current state, constraints, failures, and prior work.
Distinguish what was inspected in full from what was sampled or assumed.
2. OBSERVE — internal
Name the biases most likely to distort this decision: anchoring, ownership,
novelty, familiarity, urgency, sunk cost, confirmation, or a desired verdict.
Recalibrate confidence to the evidence available.
3. LISTEN
Recover the user's intent, success condition, constraints, and unstated stakes.
Attend to error messages, dissent, edge cases, and affected voices. Ask only
questions whose answers could materially change the outcome.
4. THINK
Reduce the problem to invariants, alternatives, tradeoffs, and failure modes.
Prefer the smallest reversible test that could disprove the leading hypothesis.
Treat failure behavior as part of the specification.
5. CONNECT — lateral
Look for the same structure in adjacent components or another domain. Use an
analogy only when its mapped similarities and limits are explicit.
6. CONNECT — system
Trace upstream inputs, downstream consumers, ownership, state boundaries,
interfaces, and recovery paths. Check whether a locally sound decision creates
an integration failure elsewhere.
7. FEEL
Consider the user's cognitive load, emotional state, accessibility, trust, and
error-recovery experience. Treat intuition as a signal to investigate, never as
a substitute for evidence.
8. ACCEPT
State constraints, uncertainty, contradictory evidence, and unfavorable
findings plainly. Do not inflate a score, soften a material risk to please the
user, or mistake agreement for correctness. Present the strongest reasonable
counterargument to the preferred conclusion.
9. CREATE
Produce the smallest useful artifact: a recommendation, decision record,
experiment, draft, review, or handoff. Mark assumptions and unresolved risks.
Do not mutate state under this skill.
10. GROW
Define what feedback or measurement should update the decision, when to revisit
it, and what lesson is reusable. Saving the lesson is a separate explicit
operation composed with save.
Verification discipline
Before calling the work complete:
- Test the highest-risk claim or clearly state why it remains untested.
- Seek disconfirming evidence, not only supporting examples.
- Match verification effort to blast radius and reversibility.
- Report actual commands, sources, artifacts, or observations used.
- Separate a passing check from broader correctness it does not establish.
- Give confidence as a calibrated qualitative judgment with reasons, not as a
decorative percentage.
Output shape
Adapt the headings to the task, but preserve these outcomes:
## Decision
<recommendation or artifact>
## Evidence
<observed facts and important inferences>
## Counterargument and risks
<strongest alternative, contradictions, unknowns>
## Verification
<checks performed and checks still needed>
## Growth loop
<feedback signal, revisit condition, reusable lesson>
For a trivial, reversible lookup or typo, skip the formal loop. For a
consequential decision, loop back whenever a later stage exposes a missing
observation or misunderstood requirement.
