Explore skills

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 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 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 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.

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

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 working on a hard problem where most attempts fail — when 99 of 100 things won't work and the temptation is to give up before the 100th; when each failed attempt's value (it ruled something out) is being underweighted; when incremental compound progress on an unsharpened-needle target is needed

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 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 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 tempted to treat the current session as interchangeable with past or future ones — the every-session-is-unique discipline, and the invocation surface that fires durable-fix skills a fungible-session mindset would skip. Fires when about to defer something to "a future session" as if that session will reconstitute this exact context, when a memory-aware agent assumes "I'll just re-derive it

Use when, just after abandoning or failing at something, you catch yourself concluding "that wasn't worth reaching anyway" — the post-mortem self-deception / motivated-reasoning anti-pattern. Fires when writing a post-mortem after a failure or rollback, recording a lesson after a retreat, or when an operator/agent's stated reason for quitting smells like comfort rather than analysis. The tell: a g