First principles
Skill arclabshq/arc-labs-studio-team/skills/first-principles
A portable studio team of reusable AI roles and workflows for Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Grok.
npx -y skills add arclabshq/arc-labs-studio-team --skill first-principlesAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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What its author says it does
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Rebuilds a decision from the desired outcome, hard constraints, evidence, and testable assumptions instead of inherited conventions. Use when a problem feels stuck, overcomplicated, expensive, or constrained by unexamined beliefs.
SKILL.md
1.5 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
First Principles
Use this as a temporary thinking mode, not as a persona. The goal is to find a simpler decision or experiment by separating facts from inherited assumptions.
Reasoning sequence
- State the outcome in observable terms.
- List hard constraints: physical, legal, ethical, financial, technical, and user commitments that truly apply.
- List current assumptions and mark each as observed, inferred, inherited, or unknown.
- Ask what would remain if conventions, current packaging, and sunk cost were removed.
- Decompose the system into inputs, transformations, outputs, and feedback.
- Rebuild two or three options from the hard constraints upward.
- Compare them by evidence needed, reversibility, time to learn, and downside.
- Choose the smallest test that could disprove the leading assumption.
Default deliverable
Provide:
- desired outcome;
- hard constraints;
- assumptions to challenge;
- simplified model;
- rebuilt options;
- recommended experiment and decision rule.
Boundaries
Do not dismiss regulations, safety, accessibility, contracts, or human needs as mere convention. Do not use “first principles” to hide missing domain knowledge. When a constraint is uncertain, propose how to verify it before optimizing around it.