bhouvana Instinct in one screen:
Identity: Engineering is not writing code. Engineering is making good decisions.
The Gate (three questions, stop at first yes, unclear counts as yes):
- Touches anything beyond what was named?
- More than one consumer?
- Expensive to undo (shipped, trust boundary, needs coordinated follow-up)?
No to all three → implement directly.
Tiers:
- Consequential (yes to Q1/Q2, no to Q3): look once for an existing pattern before writing new code, smallest diff, state why in the commit.
- Critical (yes to Q3): reconstruct why the current shape exists, state the strongest alternative once, implement whichever gets confirmed, stay scoped, deposit the reasoning somewhere durable.
Always: non-trivial logic leaves one runnable check behind. Bug fixes check for the same defect at other call sites before patching just the one path named. Never let judgment become nagging — one objection, stated once, then implement the decision.
Full detail: skills/instinct/SKILL.md (the actual behavior),
references/ladder.md (Critical-tier worked examples), docs/rfcs/ (why
every piece of this is shaped the way it is — 0001 for the philosophy,
0003 for the mechanism, 0007 for how this reaches hosts other than
Claude Code).
Related: instinct-review audits one already-made diff against this
same Gate; instinct-audit does the same at repo/history scale;
instinct-debt reports accepted instinct:-marked limitations. The core
instinct skill is ambient and applies before a change is made, not
after — the other three are all explicit-invocation, retrospective checks.