Explore skills

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 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.

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 (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 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 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 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