evnchn-agentic

Use BEFORE declaring victory / shipping / committing — get adversarial multi-angle review from at least one of three source classes (subagent, internet, other LLMs via API). Inter-links with chengyu-create-something-from-nothing — high-hallucination LLM sources behave like uncontrolled 無中生有, so apply the verify-don't-trust-verbatim discipline. Source selection via BullshitBench (canonical hallucin

Use when a failure, debate, or process is mid-unfolding and the urge is to intervene immediately — but premature intervention loses information. Let the failure reach its natural shape so the full signal is captured before patching. Strict caveat against the modern schadenfreude reading; this is observation discipline, not indifference.

GAN thinking mode — when delivering X, also run an adversarial pipe asking "is X fundamentally flawed as a concept? achievable with existing means via refactor? do bugs/vulns exist in X?". Two timings — pre-ship (in-vacuum, no real-world signal yet) and post-ship (with feedback signal). DELIBERATE REFRAME of the chengyu: the literal Chinese is "two pipes simultaneously" (parallel-cooperative), but

Use when an output is at risk of verbosity — the TLDR-outside / details-inside discipline. Distinguished from chengyu-great-wisdom-looks-foolish on the representation axis — 大智若愚 = resist performative complexity, 言簡意賅 = resist sprawl. Orthogonal failure modes; you can be performatively-clever AND brief, or non-clever AND verbose.

Use when about to emit a warning, flag, or alert for a LOW-confidence issue — the alert-fatigue / signal-credibility discipline. False alarms have an asymmetric cost: after repeated low-confidence warnings, the operator stops reading the channel, and the one true warning gets ignored. Fires on choosing a log level (warn vs info vs error), inflating a PR title/commit to "CRITICAL", marking speculat

Use AFTER first-round planning is complete, to do META-PLANNING — what wasn't planned that should have been? What pitfalls don't surface in the first round due to existing context bias, context rot, plan mode system prompt biases, or other distortions? Triage importance, surface escape routes (subagent assessment, backups, operator ready for ctrl+C, anything). NOT a duplicate of plan mode or commo

Use when choosing the FORMAT of an output, not just its verbosity — match the medium (text, markdown, HTML dashboard, PPTX, DOCX) to the consumer's actual use mode. Operator-specific extension: also covers length calibration for different contexts. Outside scope is video (requires autovideo pipeline — too heavy to be native capability). The chengyu is about teaching with the right material, where

Use when proven-elsewhere logic should be transplanted into your project rather than re-derived — covers both reviving abandoned-but-good code from your own history AND copying live working config (linting, CI, README templates, infra patterns) from a healthy sibling project. The "soul" is the working logic; the "body" is your project that receives it.

Use when facing a task too large to hold in one piece — decompose into atomic subtasks. Divide-and-conquer in chengyu form. Pairs naturally with subagent dispatch (each part becomes one subagent's job) and with the dispatching-parallel-agents superpower. The decomposition itself is the skill — the parts should each have one clear purpose and a well-defined interface to the others.

Use when the operator's requirement, the failing test, the stakeholder argument, or any other inputs are STILL IN FLUX and the temptation is to start implementing now "to be ready" — strategic patience while the situation clarifies, rather than burning cycles on work that may need to be redone after the dust settles

Use when at or near the 80% mark of a deliverable and the temptation is to keep polishing past good-enough. The 80/20 rule encapsulated — the last 20% of polish often consumes 80% of remaining time and rarely changes the operator's decision. Distinguished from chengyu-retreat-is-best (abandon FAILED approach) and from chengyu-great-wisdom-looks-foolish / chengyu-words-concise-meaning-complete (res

Use when about to extract maximum present value from a RENEWABLE source in a way that degrades the source itself — the kill-the-source / unsustainable-extraction anti-pattern. Fires when about to max out an API rate limit or quota to ship one task faster (risks the access), flood the operator with low-priority pings (burns attention/trust budget), sacrifice maintainability for one task's throughpu