mece-decomposelisted

# MECE decompose A quorum spends its budget on parallel miners; this skill decides **what each miner owns**. Mutually exclusive branches mean no duplicated miner spend. Collectively exhaustive branches mean no blind spot the judge panel has to catch expensively after the fact. The judges already do overlap-and-gap detection *post-hoc* — this is the same operation run *pre-hoc*, before the money is spent. It also stands alone: spec reviews, plan audits, "did we cover everything" questions. ## Two modes **Decompose** (given a question) — build the tree: 1. **Bound the domain first.** One sentence each for in-scope and out-of-scope. Most "incomplete" breakdowns are actually unbounded ones. 2. **One dimension per tier.** Split by exactly one axis at each level (by component, by lifecycle stage, by stakeholder, by failure mode — never a mix). Mixing axes in one tier is where overlaps come from. 3. **Two to three levels deep, no more.** Leaves below that are tasks, not questions. 4. **Code each leaf**: `[F]act` (established), `[I]nference` (derived, show from what), `[A]ssumption` (unverified — say what evidence would settle it), plus a confidence word (high/medium/low). 5. **Mark the kill-test branch**: the one branch which, if it fails, invalidates the top-level answer. It gets mined first and hardest. 6. **Self-validate before presenting** (the checklist below). **Validate** (given an existing breakdown — a spec, plan, miner roster, or org of work): map i