first-principles-review

First Principles Review

Purpose

Use this as a lightweight decision review before another Aegis workflow makes a directional choice. It is a compositional skill, not a standalone workflow.

Do not replace brainstorming, systematic-debugging, writing-plans, requesting-code-review, or verification-before-completion. Use it to clean the decision surface those skills will act on.

When this review materially changes the direction, surface Aegis Visibility in natural prose: name the first principle, dropped assumption, smallest sufficient path, or owner / retirement falsifier that changed the decision. Keep it advisory and task-specific; do not turn the lens into approval authority or a generic skill trace.

Use When

• The user asks for first principles, first-principles thinking, or Occam's razor.
• A design, plan, or fix has multiple plausible paths and unclear selection criteria.
• The task has ambiguous goals, competing constraints, or product/architecture direction risk.
• Debugging is drifting into repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, consumer-side patches, or "just add another branch" reasoning.
• A review finds that the implementation may be locally correct but directionally wrong.

Do Not Use

• Simple Q&A, status checks, tiny wording/config edits, or clearly bounded single-owner changes.
• Mechanical execution of an approved plan unless a new directional conflict appears.
• As a required step for every task, every turn, or every TDD cycle.

Five-Line Review

Answer only what is needed, usually in five short lines:

First Principle: What irreducible outcome must this satisfy?
Non-negotiables: What constraints cannot be broken?
Assumptions to Drop: What is habit, inherited shape, or unproven preference?
Smallest Sufficient Path: What is the least complex path that satisfies the first principle?
Escalation Signal: What finding would require spec/design/architecture review?

For repair choices, "smallest" means smallest sufficient stable repair, not the smallest textual diff:

Minimality Check:
- Smallest textual diff:
- Correct owner:
- Bug class fixed:
- New branch/fallback added:
- Old path retired or scheduled:
- Verdict: sufficient repair | local patch | needs first-principles review

Decision Hygiene Review

Use this escalation only when a design, fix, or plan needs endorsement before it is written into a spec or implementation plan.

Escalate from the five-line review when any of these risk signals appear:

• multiple plausible paths and no clear selection criteria
• a new owner, duplicate owner, fallback, adapter, or compat-only carrier
• an old path that may need delete-first handling or a retirement trigger
• an unverified assumption that the proposal depends on
• user language such as "more elegant", "long-term stable", "first principles", or "Occam"
• a plan could encode the wrong owner, abstraction, compatibility boundary, or retirement schedule

Use this compact shape:

First-principles invariants:
- Non-negotiable goal:
- Non-negotiable constraints:
- Historical assumptions to delete:

Owner / retirement matrix:
- New canonical owner:
- Old owner:
- Compat-only carrier:
- Delete-first / retirement trigger:

Falsification matrix:
- Dependency-removal test:
- Counterexample scenario:
- Must fail / degrade / remain correct cases:

Verdict:
- Adopt / revise / reject / needs evidence:
- Blocking gaps:
- Next evidence:

Architecture Integrity Lens

Use this narrower lens when a proposal is executable but may still encode the wrong owner, abstraction, contract boundary, or retirement path. It is advisory method-pack output and may be embedded inside Decision Hygiene Review when that is enough.

Trigger it when any of these appear before approach selection, task decomposition, review, or completion-risk reporting:

• responsibilities may overlap or a canonical owner is unclear
• the smallest diff adds a caller-side fallback, guard, adapter, or compat-only carrier
• an existing source-of-truth or contract could solve the class of problem at a higher level
• a stale owner, fallback, or old path may keep carrying real logic
• the work makes a long-term stability, "cleaner architecture", or higher-level simplification claim

Use this compact shape:

Architecture Integrity Lens:
- Invariant: What must remain true for the system to be coherent?
- Canonical owner / contract: Which owner, contract, or source-of-truth should carry the behavior?
- Responsibility overlap: What duplicate owner, caller-side patch, fallback, or stale path might still carry real logic?
- Higher-level simplification: Can the problem be solved at the owner / contract / source-of-truth layer instead of by another local branch?
- Retirement / falsifier: What old path retires, or what evidence would disprove this architecture judgment?
- Verdict: proceed | revise design | split owner | return to baseline | needs ADR/baseline sync

Do not run this lens for every low-risk task. If it does not change the decision surface, return to the active workflow immediately.

Composition

• With brainstorming: run before approach selection when the request is broad, ambiguous, likely to inherit a poor product shape, or involves owner / retirement / fallback / adapter risk. Use Decision Hygiene Review or the narrower Architecture Integrity Lens before recommending or selecting an approach when those signals appear.
• With systematic-debugging: run after evidence shows repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, or consumer-side patching.
• With writing-plans: run before task decomposition when the plan could encode the wrong owner, abstraction, compatibility boundary, fallback, adapter, or retirement schedule. If the approved spec did not already cover this, use Decision Hygiene Review or the Architecture Integrity Lens before writing tasks.
• With requesting-code-review: run when review should check direction and owner integrity, not just code quality.
• With verification-before-completion: use only to name residual directional risk. It does not grant completion authority.

Boundaries

• Prefer evidence from current project files, baseline docs, tests, logs, and user requirements. If evidence is missing, mark the line as unknown rather than inventing a principle.
• Keep the result advisory. This skill may recommend escalation, but it does not create authoritative GateDecision, PolicySnapshot, or completion authority.
• If the five-line review does not change the decision surface, return to the active workflow immediately.