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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 a symptom has an OBVIOUS causal root and the temptation is to patch the symptom — when a bug fix is masking the real issue, when retries are hiding a contract violation, when a workaround is becoming permanent. The default debugging frame; reach for chengyu-besiege-wei-save-zhao only after exhausting this.

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 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 bringing forward priors from PAST sessions / cross-agent history before doing new work — NOT about re-reading the current context window (which is trivially in-context). Specifically triggered when auto-compact is lossy, when cross-session reference is needed, when the same topic has been treated before, or when the original work was done in a different agent's session. The discipline is

Use when about to claim work is done / verified / working — empirical verification is required, not model-based confidence. Run the code, observe the output, check the file exists, verify the page renders, read the actual stack trace. Don't trust your model of the system; trust the system. Pairs with the verification-before-completion superpower by giving it a cultural handle that operator-side ha

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 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