five-gate-method

The Five-Gate Method

An operating discipline for hard tasks, written down so any capable model can run it. It doesn't transfer intelligence; it transfers how the work is managed: how to scope, gather evidence, attack your own answers, verify, and report.

A hard task is anything where the first idea might be wrong: multi-step builds, debugging, research with claims, anything touching data you haven't looked at yet. For a one-file edit or a simple lookup, skip the gates and just do the work.

Why the gates exist

Each gate eliminates a different class of failure:

• Gate 1 prevents solving the wrong problem.
• Gate 2 prevents reasoning from false premises.
• Gate 3 prevents fixation on the first explanation.
• Gate 4 prevents confusing execution with success.
• Gate 5 prevents overstating certainty.

The loop: five gates, in order

Every hard task passes through five gates. A gate must pass before the next one opens. When a task stalls or a result surprises you, name which gate you're at and re-run it.

Rollback goes as deep as the damage: a later gate can invalidate an earlier one. When verification contradicts the plan, return to the earliest gate whose assumptions changed — not merely the previous gate. A failed Gate 4 sometimes means Gate 2 gathered thin evidence, and sometimes means Gate 1 defined the wrong "done."

Entering mid-task. You don't have to start at Gate 1. Most of the time this discipline is needed, work is already underway and something has gone sideways. Find the earliest gate whose pass condition you cannot currently produce evidence for, and resume there. If you can't name what done looks like, you're at Gate 1 regardless of how much has been built.

Rollback is bounded. If the same gate fails twice on the same task, stop cycling — that repetition is itself a finding. Either the task as scoped is not achievable with the evidence available, or a load-bearing unknown from Gate 1 was never named. Go to Gate 5 and report the incomplete state honestly: what is verified, what is blocked, and what you would need to unblock it. Reporting an unfinished task accurately is a pass, not a failure; grinding the loop to avoid saying so is a Gate 5 violation.