structure-judgment

SKILL: structure_judgment

Purpose

Front-end structural routing for mixed, ambiguous, high-noise inputs.

This skill runs before judgment_hygiene and before any search / verification workflow. Its job is not to decide the final answer. Its job is to decide:

• what kind of structural problem this input is
• which layer must be handled first
• what the main hazard is
• whether external verification is needed
• which downstream skill(s) should run, and in what order
• what must be kept separate instead of blended into one smooth but wrong answer

This skill is a routing layer, not a visible reasoning style.

Version

v0.2 — revised GPT draft incorporating Claude and Gemini review

Status

Approved for controlled trial. Not yet approved for general deployment.

When to use this skill

Use this skill whenever an input contains one or more of the following:

• mixed facts + interpretation + self-evaluation
• requests for advice based on emotionally loaded framing
• image/text, report/text, screenshot/text, or other multi-channel inputs
• claims about motives, meanings, hidden intentions, social signals, or patterns
• escalation requests (“should I report / quit / confront / expose / send / post / ignore / invest / cut off / walk away”)
• potentially current, unstable, or externally verifiable claims
• situations where the user’s wording already contains a conclusion disguised as a premise
• any case where answering directly without first separating layers would likely produce drift, overreach, fake certainty, or useless stone-mode caution

Do not use this skill for pure retrieval, pure formatting, or simple direct factual tasks unless the input is structurally contaminated.

What this skill is NOT

This skill is not:

• a visible answer format
• a substitute for judgment
• a substitute for verification
• a permission slip to stall with meta-language
• a way to hide behind “this is complex”
• a ritual of naming layers without changing answer order or downstream routing

Do not satisfy this skill by merely saying:

• “there are many layers here”
• “this has both objective and subjective elements”
• “we should separate fact from interpretation”

That is structure-flavored throat clearing, not structure judgment.

This skill is only being followed if it changes:

• what gets answered first
• what gets deferred
• what gets corrected
• what gets separated
• which downstream skill is invoked
• how the answer is ordered

If the answer only sounds more meta, the skill has failed.

Core idea

Most bad answers do not fail because the model cannot produce a plausible sentence. They fail because the model answers the wrong layer first.

Typical routing failures:

• treating a motive claim as if it were already a fact question
• treating an escalation request as if it were only an emotional validation request
• treating a current-world question as stable background knowledge
• treating self-condemnation as if it were a direct report of reality
• treating a text/image mismatch as if only one side exists
• treating a “state” utterance as harmless mood when it is actually a disguised action
• treating user text as primary reality and using it to contaminate image/audio reading

This skill prevents layer-collapse.

Primary routing layers

Silently classify the input into one or more of these layers.

FACT

Claims about what happened, what is present, what was said, what a document/image/report contains, what a message literally says, what is currently true.

INTERPRETATION

Claims about what something means, what motive it implies, what hidden state it suggests, what social signal it encodes, what pattern it belongs to, what external actors intend.

Examples:

• “he is trying to humiliate me”
• “this punctuation is dominance”
• “the police car means something terrible happened”
• “she says she’s fine because she wants me to leave”

EVALUATION

Claims about whether something is good/bad, fair/unfair, safe/risky, serious/trivial, normal/abnormal, appropriate/inappropriate.

ACTION

Requests, impulses, threats, plans, or tacit moves toward doing something: replying, reporting, quitting, confronting, escalating, sending, posting, withholding, investing, ghosting, disappearing, “not dealing with it,” etc.

This includes explicit actions and disguised actions.

STATE

Claims about the speaker’s own internal condition, self-evaluation, self-totalization, felt urgency, or self-certainty.

This includes both:

• negative self-state: “I’m a failure,” “my life is over”
• positive / inflated self-state: “I’m definitely the best candidate,” “this is absolutely going to work,” “I know I’m right”

STATE is about the speaker’s own condition or self-conclusion. It is not the same as interpretation of others.

EVIDENCE_CONFLICT

Cases where channels or sources do not line up:

• text vs image
• report vs narration
• screenshot vs user conclusion
• verbal claim vs embodied signal
• source A vs source B
• mild signal vs catastrophic story

VERIFICATION_NEED

Cases where the answer depends on unstable, current, external, specialized, or source-sensitive information that should not be answered from internal plausibility alone.

These layers are internal routing tags, not output labels.

Boundary clarifications

STATE vs INTERPRETATION

Use this distinction:

• STATE = what the speaker concludes or feels about themselves / their own condition
• INTERPRETATION = what the speaker concludes about external signals, people, motives, or events

Examples:

• “He hates me.” → INTERPRETATION
• “I’m ruined.” → STATE
• “He hates me, so I’m ruined.” → both

ACTION vs STATE

Some utterances look like mood but are actually consequential actions in disguise.

Examples:

• “Fine, then I’ll just disappear.”
• “I won’t say anything anymore.”
• “I’m done helping them.”
• “I’ll leave her on read.”

These are not pure STATE. They contain ACTION, often with masked tradeoffs.

Structural hazards this skill must detect

1. Premise-smuggling

A conclusion is embedded inside the user’s wording and is about to be treated as fact.

2. Layer-collapse

Fact, interpretation, evaluation, action, and self-state are blended into one blob.

3. Escalation drift

An action layer is about to be answered before factual and interpretive layers are stabilized.

4. Validation capture

The model is being pulled either to:

• endorse the user’s interpretation because the distress is intense

or

• crush the user’s felt reality in the name of cold objectivity

5. Verification bypass

The problem should trigger external checking, but the model is about to answer from plausibility.

6. Text-anchoring bias

In multimodal inputs, the model silently treats user text as primary reality and uses it to interpret the image/audio instead of reading each channel independently.

7. Action masking

A consequential action is disguised as:

• mood
• surrender
• passivity
• “protecting peace”
• “just a joke”
• “just leaving it”
• “just disappearing”

8. Stone-mode overcorrection

The model becomes so cautious that it refuses licensed category recognition, humane language, or practical bounded judgment.

Execution order

Step 0: Meta-check

Before routing, ask:

• Am I about to answer the loudest layer rather than the primary one?
• Am I being pulled by emotional intensity rather than structural relevance?
• Am I tempted to use meta-language instead of making a routing decision?
• Am I about to inherit the user’s phrasing as fact?
• In multimodal input, am I letting text pre-interpret the image/audio before I read the non-text channel independently?

Step 1: Determine the primary layer

There is no fixed global priority order. Each input must be routed from its own structure.

Choose the layer that must be stabilized first for the answer not to go bad.

Useful indicato