Refute

/refute — Try to Break the Claim

The single highest-leverage quality procedure. Plausible-but-wrong is the default failure mode of every model and every tired human. This skill converts skepticism into a forced procedure. Repo-agnostic: works on any project, any language.

Invocation

/refute                          # refute the most recent completion claim in this session
/refute the pagination fix works # refute a specific claim

Procedure (all 5 steps, in order — no skipping)

1. State the claim precisely. One sentence, falsifiable. "The fix works" is not a claim. "GET /players?page=2 returns rows 51–100 with HTTP 200" is.

2. Enumerate the ways it could be false. Minimum 3, each concrete:

   • Wrong input class (empty, null, unicode, huge, negative, concurrent)
   • Wrong environment (fresh clone, missing env var, prod-shaped data volume)
   • Wrong layer (the symptom moved, the root cause didn't)
   • Untested path (error branch, permission denied, timeout)

3. Pick the strongest refutation and RUN it. Actual command, actual output. Not "this should handle it" — execute. If it can't be executed, say so explicitly and downgrade the claim to UNVERIFIED.

4. Verdict, one of exactly three:

   • CONFIRMED — refutation attempted and failed; paste the command + output as evidence
   • REFUTED — found the break; the claim is false, say so plainly, fix or file
   • UNVERIFIED — could not execute a real test; the claim stays unproven and must be reported as such (never silently upgraded to done)

5. Record. The verdict + evidence goes wherever the claim was going: commit message (Evidence: line), PR body, issue comment. A claim without its verdict attached did not happen.

Rules

• Default posture: the claim is false until step 3 fails to break it.
• The layer rule (done-claims). Refute a done-claim at the layer where it is EXPERIENCED, not where it was produced. "Merged" proves the code layer; "done" asserts the user layer — unpromoted branches, undeployed builds, and unapplied migrations all manufacture false-dones that commit-level evidence can't catch. Without observing the live artifact, the honest verdict is CONFIRMED (code layer) / UNVERIFIED (live) — name both layers.
• One refutation run beats ten paragraphs of reasoning about why it's probably fine.
• If step 2 produces a refutation you can't afford to run (e.g. prod-only), that is a finding: name the coverage gap in the verdict.
• Never soften REFUTED. "Mostly works" = REFUTED with details.

Worked example (real ruling, 2026-07-09 — reproduced as a static transcript)

Claim: "the judgment hooks work from a cold clone" (as first shipped).

1. Falsifiable form: in a fresh sandbox with only shipped files, spec-citation blocks a protected-path edit (exit 2) and passes an unprotected one (exit 0).
2. Failure candidates: wrong env (cold clone), config not read, glob mismatch.
3. Ran the sandbox matrix with a hand-written config → spec-citation FAILED to block: exit 0 where 2 was expected. Before declaring REFUTED, refuted the refuter: the test config used invented keys (protected/spec_hint); the shipped keys are protected_globs/specs_hint.
4. Re-ran against the shipped judgment.json.example → block=2, pass=0, fire-once marker all green (hooks/judgment/test.sh).
5. CONFIRMED — evidence: sandbox matrix vs shipped example config, all green. The first red was the harness's fault — which is the lesson: refute the refutation's setup before trusting a red.

Composes with

• /gate — a kill-gate threshold is a pre-agreed refutation.
• /premortem — premortem failure modes are refutation candidates.
• /altitude — after a cause-layer fix, refute the original SYMPTOM-layer claim to prove the fix propagated.
• /drift — a drift sweep is batch refutation of a spec's claims against the code.
• /verdict — REFUTED/SURVIVED outcomes worth remembering get logged there.
• /sweep — a sweep's Phase 2 is /refute run adversarially at scale.
• claim-evidence hook (hooks/judgment/claim-evidence.sh) — mechanically blocks done-claims in commits that carry no evidence; /refute is how you produce it.