Vision Alignment Foresight

Vision Alignment Foresight

Test whether a vision is still worth building, not just whether it sounds coherent.

Use this skill to connect four things that often drift apart: stated intent, real implementation, observed evidence, and future direction.

Trigger Examples

• Should trigger: "Analyze this vision against the app and future agent direction."
• Should trigger: "Does our repo strategy still make sense given current usage and platform changes?"
• Should trigger: "Criticize this roadmap and predict where it will fail."
• Should not trigger: "Write an ADR for this accepted decision." Use repository-governance-lifecycle.
• Should not trigger: "Run a broad multi-agent critique only." Use mixture-of-experts.

Workflow

1. Name the intent.

   • Restate the human goal in one or two sentences.
   • Separate the durable purpose from the proposed implementation.
   • Mark what is explicit, inferred, and unknown.

2. Map the application reality.

   • Read the North Star, ADRs, FAQs, skill docs, config, harness entrypoints, tests, and release notes that define current behavior.
   • Identify the actual user, maintainer, agent, and runtime surfaces.
   • Record any contradiction between docs, code, config, and user behavior.

3. Collect evidence.

   • Prefer concrete signals: usage logs, eval results, issue/PR history, support questions, benchmark outcomes, adoption friction, failing tests, repeated manual workflows, and rollback history.
   • If future direction matters, do current research using primary sources where possible.
   • Label every major claim as observed, researched, inferred, or speculative.

4. Run critical lenses.

   • Product/user lens: who benefits, who pays the complexity cost, what workflow improves?
   • Engineering lens: what must be true in code, tests, data, deploys, and interfaces?
   • Agent experience lens: can another agent discover, execute, verify, and recover without hidden context?
   • Maintenance lens: what will decay, fork, or become impossible to support?
   • Ecosystem/future lens: does the plan align with platform movement, standards, and likely integration paths?
   • Adversarial lens: what evidence would prove the vision wrong?

5. Forecast with humility.

   • Use time horizons: now, 3-6 months, 12-24 months.
   • State confidence and assumptions.
   • Define leading indicators that would increase confidence.
   • Define falsifiers that should trigger a pivot or rollback.

6. Choose the smallest proof.

   • Recommend one bounded proof that can validate the vision with real behavior.
   • Prefer dogfood loops, evals, typed harness actions, or repeated repo workflows over prose-only agreement.
   • Do not recommend broad platform work until at least one narrow proof works end to end.

7. Make learning durable.

   • If the analysis changes a standing decision, update an ADR or FAQ via repository-governance-lifecycle.
   • If it changes a skill, run skill-authoring-lifecycle and skill-eval-improve.
   • If it changes a repo-local feedback loop, update the local harness contract or unknown-case queue.

Output Format

Use this shape unless the user requests another format:

## Intent
{explicit goal, inferred goal, unknowns}

## Evidence
| Signal | Source | Strength | What it implies |
|--------|--------|----------|-----------------|

## Alignment Verdict
{aligned | partially aligned | misaligned | too early}

## Critical Gaps
- {gap, why it matters, evidence}

## Future Fit
| Horizon | Prediction | Confidence | Assumptions | Falsifier |
|---------|------------|------------|-------------|-----------|

## Recommendation
{keep/refine/pivot/kill} because {reason}.

## Smallest Proof
{one concrete proof loop, owner/surface, success metric, rollback signal}

## Durable Updates
{ADR/FAQ/skill/eval/harness updates needed}

Decision Heuristics

• A vision is healthy when repeated real workflows make it more precise.
• A future claim is weak unless it names time horizon, confidence, and falsifier.
• A skill or plugin vision is weak if it cannot explain when it should not trigger.
• A harness vision is weak if it has no deterministic proof loop.
• A governance vision is weak if the only artifact is prose and no agent can act on it.
• A roadmap is suspect when every option is additive and none can be killed.

Anti-Patterns

Related Skills

Install

npx skills add arenukvern/skill_steward --skill vision-alignment-foresight

Sources

See references/sources.md. When researching, follow skill-source-citations.