using-denial-ladders

Using Denial Ladders

Overview

This skill owns one bounded responsibility: using denial ladders. Its focus is using denial ladders within creativity lifecycle boundaries. It converts declared inputs into typed artifacts and reproducible evidence without silently changing product scope.

Trigger

Activate only when the project is in one of these stages: divergence, synthesis, all contract preconditions pass, and the router identifies a missing output this skill can produce. Do not activate merely because the skill name resembles the user request.

Required Inputs

• creative-brief
• Current gate result, open findings, artifact hashes, and invalidation state
• Required tools: none
• Optional tools: none
• Confirmed human decisions relevant to this scope

Method-Specific Protocol

1. Define the exact decision, actors, objects, states, invariants, side effects, and non-goals owned by using denial ladders.
2. Build a decision table for normal, boundary, invalid, permission, failure, retry, recovery, concurrency, migration, and abuse conditions relevant to using denial ladders.
3. Apply using denial ladders only to direct input artifacts; record assumptions, rejected alternatives, and any human decision still required.
4. Trace the resulting contract to user value, security, reliability, cost, operability, and downstream consumers.
5. Create reproducible checks that would fail if using denial ladders were incomplete or implemented incorrectly.

Procedure

1. Freeze the challenge, constraints, forbidden defaults, and evaluation frame.
2. Generate independent mechanism-level candidates before cross-contamination.
3. Define the exact decision, actors, objects, states, invariants, side effects, and non-goals owned by using denial ladders.
4. Build a decision table for normal, boundary, invalid, permission, failure, retry, recovery, concurrency, migration, and abuse conditions relevant to using denial ladders.
5. Apply using denial ladders only to direct input artifacts; record assumptions, rejected alternatives, and any human decision still required.
6. Trace the resulting contract to user value, security, reliability, cost, operability, and downstream consumers.
7. Create reproducible checks that would fail if using denial ladders were incomplete or implemented incorrectly.
8. Apply the named divergence or mutation operation.
9. Represent candidates as structured idea genomes.
10. Remove semantic duplicates and fake novelty.
11. Hand off distinct candidates without selecting a winner prematurely.