explore-my-data

explore-my-data

The colleague who keeps your exploration honest: registers what you're looking for before you look, counts every cut you take, and won't let the lucky cell become the headline.

When to use

Fire at the START of an open-ended investigation — "find insights in this", "explore the data", "what drives [metric]", "any patterns in the segments", "dig into why X varies" — with no wrongness symptom in hand. Works whether the cuts are still to be run or a results table is already on the desk (then everything already seen is registered as post-hoc). Do NOT fire when a number is already wrong or moved (triage-my-number), when a controlled causal result needs validating (audit-my-experiment), when the premises of a SOURCE need clearing (audit-my-assumptions), when no question has been chosen yet and the agenda itself is the ask — "what could our data tell us?", sources listed but nothing in hand (worth-knowing charters the questions; this room runs a chosen one), or to communicate findings (brief-my-findings, once confirmed). groundwork stops before analysis — this is that analysis, harnessed.

The trap this exists to beat

Asked to "find insights," a capable model dredges — fluently. It slices until something looks striking, then hypothesizes backwards from the hit (HARKing); it never counts the slices, so the one-in-twenty fluke reads as a discovery; it leads with "+96% lift!" over "5 conversions on a base of 85"; it narrates correlation as a driver; and it ships the lucky cut as THE insight — confident, decision-shaped, and unreplicable. The garden of forking paths, walked at machine speed. This skill explores too — but it registers the questions first, logs every fork taken, keeps magnitude and base ahead of excitement, and lets nothing be called confirmed by the data that generated it.

The loop

1. Warm start, then frame + pre-register (before looking). If a knowledge-base/ exists, read what powers the look: a question-charter.md candidate routed here arrives pre-registered — adopt its question, its decision, and its how-to-read as the finding-bar, and note the candidate id so the charter can sync; prior exploration-log.md dead ends are inherited, not re-walked; a contracted metric's kpi-contract.md pins the definition you're cutting against. Then pin the decision the exploration serves, the questions/hypotheses, the population, window, grain, and the finding-bar (what magnitude on what base would matter). Write them into the hypothesis ledger BEFORE results are examined. Results already in hand? Register the questions as they stand and label everything already seen post-hoc — honestly, not retroactively "predicted."
2. Direct the cuts — and count them. Write the exact cuts/queries for the user to run (paste-back spine). EVERY cut examined — yours or theirs, hit or miss — increments the cut log. The counter never quietly resets.
3. Read results with magnitude first. For each pattern: effect size, base (n), scope, THEN any significance talk — with the multiplicity line beside it: "N cuts examined ⇒ ~N/20 false hits expected at α≈.05; this could be one of them." Correlation is stated as correlation.
4. Grade what was found. Exploratory — found (a hit, unconfirmed) · Robust pattern (consistent across related cells / dose-response / stable in the pre-period — still unconfirmed) · Dead end (recorded, not deleted — dead ends are findings too). Nothing is Confirmed at this step.
5. Write the confirmation checks. For each finding worth pursuing: a pre-specified hold-out — a fresh window, an untouched slice, a replication cut — that the user runs and pastes back. Confirmed only on that paste-back, never on the generating data. A causal "X drives Y" claim needs a design, not a cut → route to audit-my-experiment.
6. Emit + route. Write exploration-log.md (template: references/exploration-log.md); a dredge-mirage stopped gets its catches.md line; confirmed findings hand to brief-my-findings; a definition wobble surfaced mid-cut routes to kpi-contract. A question that came from a charter candidate gets its outcome (confirmed / dead end, candidate id, evidence) recorded in the log and timeline.md — worth-knowing syncs the charter from there on its next re-fire. Then stop.