Supporting material availability

This catalog copy contains the inline guidance below, but does not include the following supporting paths. They are external prerequisites, not bundled files:

• <support-root>/references/orchestration-patterns.md

Obtain the required material from the declared upstream source, or from a user-provided installation of that source. Resolve each path relative to that installation, inspect its contents, and verify any applicable license and execution prerequisites. Do not run a command or claim a referenced procedure was followed until its required file exists. Do not fabricate the missing scripts or treat an unrelated file with the same name as equivalent. Independent steps fully documented here can proceed within the user’s authorized scope; report any dependent step as unavailable.

Doubt-Driven Development

Overview

A confident answer is not a correct one. Long sessions accumulate context that quietly turns assumptions into "facts" without anyone noticing. Doubt-driven development is the discipline of materializing a fresh-context reviewer — biased to disprove, not approve — before any non-trivial output stands.

This is not /review. /review is a verdict on a finished artifact. This is an in-flight posture: non-trivial decisions get cross-examined while course-correction is still cheap.

When to Use

A decision is non-trivial when at least one of these is true:

• It introduces or modifies branching logic
• It crosses a module or service boundary
• It asserts a property the type system or compiler cannot verify (thread safety, idempotence, ordering, invariants)
• Its correctness depends on context the future reader cannot see
• Its blast radius is irreversible (production deploy, data migration, public API change)

Apply the skill when:

• About to make an architectural decision under uncertainty
• About to commit non-trivial code
• About to claim a non-obvious fact ("this is safe", "this scales", "this matches the spec")
• Working in code you don't fully understand

When NOT to use:

• Mechanical operations (renaming, formatting, file moves)
• Following a clear, unambiguous user instruction
• Reading or summarizing existing code
• One-line changes with obvious correctness
• Pure tooling operations (running tests, listing files)
• The user has explicitly asked for speed over verification

If you doubt every keystroke, you ship nothing. The skill applies only to non-trivial decisions as defined above.

Loading Constraints

This skill is designed for the main-session orchestrator, where Step 3 (DOUBT, detailed below) can spawn a fresh-context reviewer.

• Do NOT add this skill to a persona's skills: frontmatter. A persona that follows Step 3 would spawn another persona — the orchestration anti-pattern explicitly forbidden by references/orchestration-patterns.md ("personas do not invoke other personas").
• If you find yourself applying this skill from inside a subagent context (where Claude Code prevents nested subagent spawn): the preferred path is to surface to the user that doubt-driven cannot run nested and let the main session handle it. As a last resort only, a degraded self-questioning fallback exists — rewrite ARTIFACT + CONTRACT as a fresh self-prompt with a hard mental separator from your prior reasoning, and walk Steps 1–5. This is not fresh-context review (you carry your own context with you), so flag the result as degraded and prefer escalation whenever the user is reachable.

The Process

Copy this checklist when applying the skill:

Doubt cycle:
- [ ] Step 1: CLAIM — wrote the claim + why-it-matters
- [ ] Step 2: EXTRACT — isolated artifact + contract, stripped reasoning
- [ ] Step 3: DOUBT — invoked fresh-context reviewer with adversarial prompt
- [ ] Step 4: RECONCILE — classified every finding against the artifact text
- [ ] Step 5: STOP — met stop condition (trivial findings, 3 cycles, or user override)

Step 1: CLAIM — Surface what stands

Name the decision in two or three lines:

CLAIM: "The new caching layer is thread-safe under the
        read-heavy workload described in the spec."
WHY THIS MATTERS: a race here corrupts user data and is
                  hard to detect in QA.

If you can't write the claim that compactly, you have a vibe, not a decision. Surface it before scrutinizing it.

Step 2: EXTRACT — Smallest reviewable unit

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