evnchn-agentic

Use after a failure has occurred (bug shipped, test broke, deploy rolled back, data lost, security incident) — the impulse is to fix the immediate damage and move on, but the chengyu's discipline is to ALSO fix the cause so it doesn't repeat. Pairs with chengyu-remove-firewood-from-cauldron on the timing dimension — 釜底 is pre-symptom prevention, 亡羊 is post-symptom fortification.

Use when about to soften critical feedback into vague hedges, or when the operator suspects an agent (this one or another) is sugarcoating — missing the "Honest answer" framing, OR marked-honest-answer that smells performatively gentle. Self-applied: deliver the direct version even when uncomfortable. Cross-applied: name when another agent's reply has the sugarcoated shape.

Use when resisting the urge to demonstrate cleverness — obvious-and-simple is often the right answer, and performative complexity is the failure mode. REQUIRES a target parameter at invocation specifying which dimension to apply to — implementation (over-engineered code), representation (over-fancy reply / unnecessary verbosity), or both. The agent must ASK for the target if the operator hasn't sp

SUBAGENT-ONLY skill for generating a graduated spread of plausible-to-speculative solutions when the main agent is stuck in a local minimum. Output is one continuous artifact (NO dividers) that starts from verified fact and slides into bottom-K speculation; calling main-agent fact-checks throughout. Has TWO HARD PRECONDITIONS that must be met before any output: (1) running on a BullshitBench-passi

Use when the original plan needs to flex mid-flight in response to new information / changed inputs / discovered constraints — but flexibility WITHOUT defined scope degenerates into either rigid plan-sticking or unbounded winging-it. CRITICAL Step 0 (mirror of chengyu-close-door-catch-thief): scope MUST be defined before any deviation. If operator hasn't given a flexibility-scope tier, agent must

Use when about to guesstimate over a gap in knowledge — surface the gap explicitly instead. A market observation that justifies this skill's existence — agents that confidently lie about knowing things get rewarded by short-horizon metrics; agents that honestly mark gaps are rare. Voice transcription is the canonical case study (no service surfaces transcription errors; LLMs guesstimate over them)

Use when debugging by narrowing the search space — isolate the failure domain so the bug reproduces in a controlled, minimal environment. CRITICAL Step 0: the agent must ASK (if unclear) or PITCH (if obvious, just needs operator confirmation) the specific "close the door" strategy BEFORE executing it; the closing has side effects (disabling services, modifying shared state, replacing real integrat

Use when abandoning a current approach / experiment / task / project, regardless of what triggered it (not just chengyu-skill or skill-driven contexts). Three retreat levels — L1 stop work (safe, no operator confirmation needed), L2 remove occupied resources (REQUIRES operator confirmation per-item — irrevocable loss is bad), L3 update memory with "don't try this next time" (operator confirms what

Use when (a) operator describes a situation OR a plan step OR the agent shows an inverse pattern, and agent should NAME the right chengyu from the catalog (SELECTOR — default progressive-disclosure; covers current-situation naming, pre-flight plan tagging, and anti-pattern detection); (b) operator asks "what does that mean?" or "what's in this catalog?" (EXPLAINER — four-beat from 成語動畫廊's 熊貓博士 for

Use when the operator has explicitly authorised an indirect / non-causal move — when frontal attack is blocked AND chengyu-remove-firewood-from-cauldron has been exhausted, requiring attention-redirect or incentive-shift rather than technical root-fixing. Default to chengyu-remove-firewood-from-cauldron unless the operator has told the agent how to 圍魏.

Use when planning any non-trivial change — refactor, bug fix, migration, optimisation, communication — and the agent should find the natural seams / high-leverage points of the target system rather than brute-forcing through. Cut at joints (low resistance, clean result), not at bone (high resistance, blade dulls, messy result). The patron-saint chengyu of working WITH the grain of the system.

Use when designing a migration — graceful transition where the old interface stays as a thin stub/proxy/shim, real implementation moves underneath, consumers keep working through the transition, eventual cleanup of the shell once consumer count reaches zero. The schema of every good rename / endpoint move / library v1→v2 / database schema migration / monorepo split.