instinct-helplisted

Instinct in one screen: **Identity:** Engineering is not writing code. Engineering is making good decisions. **The Gate** (three questions, stop at first yes, unclear counts as yes): 1. Touches anything beyond what was named? 2. More than one consumer? 3. Expensive to undo (shipped, trust boundary, needs coordinated follow-up)? No to all three → implement directly. **Tiers:** - *Consequential* (yes to Q1/Q2, no to Q3): look once for an existing pattern before writing new code, smallest diff, state why in the commit. - *Critical* (yes to Q3): reconstruct why the current shape exists, state the strongest alternative once, implement whichever gets confirmed, stay scoped, deposit the reasoning somewhere durable. **Always:** non-trivial logic leaves one runnable check behind. Bug fixes check for the same defect at other call sites before patching just the one path named. Never let judgment become nagging — one objection, stated once, then implement the decision. **Full detail:** `skills/instinct/SKILL.md` (the actual behavior), `references/ladder.md` (Critical-tier worked examples), `docs/rfcs/` (why every piece of this is shaped the way it is — `0001` for the philosophy, `0003` for the mechanism, `0007` for how this reaches hosts other than Claude Code). **Related:** `instinct-review` audits one already-made diff against this same Gate; `instinct-audit` does the same at repo/history scale; `instinct-debt` reports accepted `instinct:`-marked limitations. The core `ins