Figure It Out

Figure it out

Before delegating or using optional capabilities, read the runtime contract. It owns eligibility, model selection, limits, and fallback.

When the task matches no playbook, design one. The deliverable before any code is the workflow itself: a sequence of phases that scales rigor to the task, runs the scientific method, and leaves a decision trail a human can audit after stepping away. Bias toward more rigor. The cost of building the wrong thing dwarfs the cost of being careful.

Don't reinvent a playbook you already have. A focused single-unit task that matches Bug fix, Perf, Feature, Visual parity, Eval, or Multi-phase plan routes there. But a large or cross-cutting version of one (a migration across many call sites, an ambitious multi-part change), or work the user reviews after stepping away, belongs here even though a single-unit version would be a Feature. The rigor and the audit trail are the point.

Start

Open a todolist whose first item is to read the Principles section of the david-mode skill. Then add the phases below as todos.

Phase A: Frame

Ground first, then commit. Don't start the run until you can state:

• The definition of done as a falsifiable predicate (the prove-it-works principle skill). "Done well" has to be checkable.
• Scope, quantified: rough units and effort, plus the blockers grounding surfaced. Raise them before spending hours, not after fifty doomed commits.
• The rigor level, biased high. One-way doors and high blast radius get more; reversible low-stakes steps get less. Rigor is gates and artifacts, not "try harder".

Present the framing and tradeoffs before committing to a long run. Reversible work proceeds (the never-block-on-the-human principle skill), but a multi-hour run earns one checkpoint.

Phase B: Design the workflow

Decompose into atomic, independently-landable units. Sequence riskiest-unknown-first so option value stays high. Scaffold and verification come before features (the foundational-thinking principle skill).

• Build the verification harness before the work, with the baseline captured from the pre-change state, so the check reads as "old value vs new value".
• For one-way-door design decisions, use architect under its depth gate. The parent owns the design and any justified arena comparison; every delegated candidate or reviewer follows the runtime's selected client-native worker tier. Skip it for mechanical work whose shape is already concrete.
• Decide what stays sequential and what can execute independently after the parent settles its contract. Apply the runtime's context, overhead, and isolation gates before dispatch. A separate branch alone does not isolate writes.
• Write the designed phase list down. That list is what the human reviews.

Then put the design into motion. Add its steps to the todolist as concrete items, after the Phase C entry and before Phase D. Run each under the Phase C loop discipline, and weave the Phase D log through them, a row as each step lands, rather than saving the whole trail for the end.

Phase C: Run the loop

Each unit is an experiment: state the hypothesis, make the smallest change, measure against the predicate on the real artifact, keep it if it advanced, revert it if it didn't. Apply the sequence-verifiable-units principle skill, verifying each unit before starting the next instead of batching checks at the end.

• Verify by inspecting the artifact, never a self-report. When something passes too easily, suspect the observation method before the system. A blank screenshot passes a lazy gate.
• Judge worker artifacts in the parent before accepting them. Add an independent reviewer only for a concrete review risk under the runtime contract. If a worker fails the gate, give a bounded correction or take over. If the gate itself is wrong, fix it in its own change rather than routing around it.
• A verdict is VERIFIED, NOT VERIFIED, or INCONCLUSIVE. Inconclusive is not a pass. Don't hide a negative.

Phase D: Keep the audit trail

Log the run via the show-me-your-work skill, one canonical TSV with a row per decision and per unit, evidence as links. figure-it-out's work is usually ambitious enough to commit the trail so the reviewer can read it in the PR; commit it when confidence has to be shown. Prefer evidence produced by committed scripts so a reviewer can re-run it. The trail plus the diff is what lets the human come back and trust the work.

Phase E: Verify and hand back

Check the whole against the Phase A predicate on the real product, not just the harness. Encode any recurring correction as a gate, a lint rule, a check, or a script, so the win can't silently regress (the encode-lessons-in-structure principle skill).

Reply: the playbook you designed, the rigor level and why, the decision-trail path, what's verified against the predicate, and what's still open.