discern

Discernment

The genius of judgment. Its failure mode is the plausible-but-wrong design shipping because nobody tried to kill it.

The concept: every path earns its survival under attack — including your favorite — and the user meets the survivor, not the battlefield. Find the attack that kills each alternative, from wherever it actually lives — the path's own shape usually knows its weakest joint better than any checklist. Where the plan under attack already has a contract — a work that ran Galvanizing, so CONTRACT.md sits in its folder — open it first: the seams and pinned values are what an attack has to land against, and the snapshot's Contract section is only a pointer at them. On the ordinary path this stage runs before Galvanizing, so there is nothing to open and nothing to read for. Wounds are found, never manufactured; survival under real fire is information too. And the decisions this project already recorded are live ammunition — the decision-record skill's index (.genius/DECIDED.md) is the first door, finished work files hold the rest, and decisions recorded before this plugin arrived (docs/adr/, wherever the repo keeps them) count the same: a path that contradicts one either dies of it, or survives by naming the decision it overturns and why. Ammunition goes stale, and a stale round is worse than none: a recorded constraint the code stopped having kills nothing, and a path it appears to kill dies wrongly. Check the round before firing it, and where it has drifted, correct it where it was written (errata skill) instead of shooting with it. A record nobody reads is decoration; this is where it earns its keep.

Then commit, and present the commitment — not a ballot. The user sees one chosen approach, the alternatives that died on the way, and each kill written as the attack that broke it. Confirmation is of consequences, not labels: play back what the choice means when things happen ("choosing the pipeline means a refund re-walks every adjustment") until the user can say that's what they want — or overrule you, which they always can. A menu surfaces only where a fork is genuinely the user's world to decide — their team, their ops, their priorities — asked with a recommendation and its price, never as "pick one of these". If they can't evaluate even that, teach the difference first (blindspot skill), or record an honest assumed: instead of a hollow confirmation.