discern git:20260906.efaff19A

Immutable. This exact content is served forever at /api/v1/blob/0d84d4b94bdaf883.

---
name: discern
description: Attack every explored path adversarially, commit to one, and present the commitment — consequences for the user to confirm, kills on the record. Use when a tracked piece of work is at its discernment stage, or when handed a ready-made plan that deserves an attack before implementation.
---

# Discernment

The genius of judgment. Its failure mode is the plausible-but-wrong design shipping because nobody tried to kill it.

The concept: **every path earns its survival under attack — including your favorite — and the user meets the survivor, not the battlefield.** Find the attack that kills each alternative from wherever it actually lives — the path's own shape knows its weakest joint better than any checklist. Where the plan under attack already has a contract (a work that ran Galvanizing), open `CONTRACT.md` first: the seams and pinned values are what an attack has to land against. Wounds are found, never manufactured; survival under real fire is information too. The decisions this project already recorded are live ammunition — `.genius/DECIDED.md` first, finished work files, and records that predate this plugin (`docs/adr/`): a path that contradicts one either dies of it, or survives by naming the decision it overturns and why. Ammunition goes stale: a recorded constraint the code stopped having kills nothing, so check each round before firing it, and correct a drifted one where it was written (`errata` skill) instead of shooting with it.

Then commit, and present the commitment — not a ballot. The user sees one chosen approach, the alternatives that died, and each kill written as the attack that broke it. Confirmation is of **consequences, not labels**: play back what the choice means when things happen ("choosing the pipeline means a refund re-walks every adjustment") until the user can say that's what they want — or overrule you. A menu surfaces only where a fork is genuinely the user's world — their team, their ops, their priorities — asked with a recommendation and its price. If they can't evaluate even that, teach the difference first (`blindspot` skill), or record an honest `assumed:`.

## How it runs

1. Read the paths, `.genius/DECIDED.md`, and the older records the repo keeps; open `CONTRACT.md` only where the plan already has one. Check each round before firing it; correct a drifted one (`errata` skill).
2. Attack every path from its own weakest joint, the favorite included, and the rule a user's answer pinned along with it — the `inventor` brief says why an answer exempts nothing. Wounds found, never manufactured; what a path survived is recorded too.
3. Commit to the survivor. Where every path dies, say so: back to `/invent` with the wounds as constraints, or to `/wonder` where they indict the problem.
4. Present the commitment as consequences, and each kill as the attack that broke it. A menu only where the fork is the user's world; teach first where they cannot evaluate it, or record an honest `assumed:`.
5. Record: the Decision section — chosen, the load-bearing why, one kill-reason line per rejected path; the whole fight under `## discernment` in the log; Invention's paths compacted out of the snapshot; `next: /galvanize`.

An unrecorded kill-reason gets re-proposed in six weeks. A decision a future stranger would re-fight earns its line in the decision index at close-out (`decision-record` skill holds the test); most stay with their work file. The fight is kept whole in the log — every attack tried on every path, the ones that landed and the ones the survivor walked out of, because what a design survived tells the builder how much load it was proved to take — under one anchor the Decision section links. The snapshot keeps the decision itself: chosen, the load-bearing why in a few lines, one kill-reason line per rejected path. A kill-reason that names no attack is an opinion.

Then `/galvanize`. Done when the chosen approach is confirmed in consequences the user could evaluate, and every rejection carries its kill-reason — written as the attack actually tried and what it broke, not as a verdict.