Use BEFORE starting any data analysis, metric, model, causal study, or any deliverable built FROM data — "what's the trend", "is X driving Y", "how many users", "did the policy work", "build me a dashboard metric", "plot/map/visualize this", "make a figure/chart/map/dashboard/table of …", "build an interactive map of…
Use ONLY when the user directly asks to verify, check, reconcile, or reproduce a result ("verify this", "check these numbers", "does this tie out?", "is this right?", "reproduce it from a clean kernel", "confirm the figures match the text") — never auto-fire it before reporting, shipping, or calling an analysis done.…
Use whenever an analysis estimates the PRIMITIVES of an economic model — preferences/utility, costs, information/consideration, search, or conduct — or needs a COUNTERFACTUAL the data doesn't contain (a merger, a new product, a tax, a removed friction, welfare/surplus, equilibrium re-pricing). Fires for structural…
Use when starting any data analysis, econometrics, or causal-inference task in R, Julia, or Python — establishes the Causal Powers discipline and routes to the right skill (question-framing, descriptive-evidence, pre-analysis-plan, analysis-state-management, data-contracts, data-preparation, analysis-craft…
Use the moment a computed result looks wrong, surprising, suspicious, or "off" — a total that doesn't reconcile, revenue that tripled after a join, a mean that moved, a coefficient with the wrong sign, a count that's too high or too low, a metric that disagrees with another team's. Bisects the data pipeline to find…