chrisallenlane

Adversarial deliberation process for making decisions. Spawns advocate agents for each option who argue their cases before a judge (you) who renders a verdict.

Abductive reasoning about causes. Takes a phenomenon, separates observations from interpretations, then spawns diagnosticians applying different reasoning lenses (technical, human-factors, process, incentive-structure, environmental, temporal, measurement-artifact, statistical) in isolation. Orchestrator evaluates candidate causes for fit-against-evidence, calibrates confidence honestly, and repor

Exploratory workflow for understanding problem spaces and drafting feature proposals, refactorings, or complex bug-fixes. Creates detailed tickets in your issue tracker without doing implementation work.

Retrospective learning from a completed experience. Takes a project, incident, decision that played out, or time period; gathers ground truth (observations) separately from recollections; spawns reflectors applying different lenses (what-worked-vs-got-lucky, what-didn't, what-surprised, system-rewards-vs-intent, decisions-that-aged, what-to-tell-past-self, patterns-that-recur) in isolation; synthe

Good-faith divergent brainstorming for achieving a goal. Validates assumptions, then spawns brainstormers running different techniques (first-principles, working-backwards, lateral, analogical, constraints-shift, etc.) in isolation, and synthesizes the pool into a report of standouts, reasonable ideas, and hybrid combinations. Produces feedback only — no code, no tickets, no artifacts.

Cuts a project release. Discovers the project's release procedure (Makefile target, RELEASING.md, CI workflow, etc.) and offers to capture it durably if missing. Always invokes /review-release as preflight, proposes a version bump from CHANGELOG, then presents an exact command plan for operator confirmation before executing step-by-step. Halts on first failure rather than attempting rollback.

Mechanical documentation hygiene. Spawns a doc-maintainer agent to audit all project documentation and fix correctness, completeness, freshness, and consistency issues autonomously within its authority. Surfaces anything requiring user judgment for approval.

Autonomous iterative refactoring workflow. Scans for tactical code quality improvements (DRY, dead code, naming, complexity), implements through SMEs, verifies with QA, commits atomically, and loops until no improvements remain.