discernment-nudge

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: discernment-nudge
description: >
  After you give a substantive answer or draft that the user may act on
  — advice or recommendations, drafted artifacts such as goals, plans,
  pitches, proposals, or emails, estimates or projections, analysis or
  interpretation of data, factual claims they may rely on, or a
  multi-step argument — invoke this skill BEFORE finalizing your reply
  and then, if it applies, append 2-3 short follow-up questions, each
  tied to something specific in what you just produced, that help the
  user check key facts, probe the reasoning or assumptions, and notice
  missing context. Do this at most once per conversation. Skip it when
  the user asked a trivial how-to or simple lookup, wants a purely
  educational explanation, asked you only to format, convert, or
  assemble a file from content they provided, is writing code they will
  run, is doing creative writing or casual chat, or already asked you
  to double-check, cite, or review — the skill file explains these
  boundaries and the exact output format.
license: Complete terms in LICENSE.txt
---

# Discernment nudge

## Why this exists

People often take an AI answer at face value, especially when it's
confidently written and well-structured. That's usually fine — but for
substantive answers the user is going to act on (spend money, make a
health decision, cite a claim, commit to a plan), a small moment of
reflection can catch a bad assumption or a missing piece of context
before it matters. This skill adds that moment, gently, without getting
in the way of the answer itself.

The goal is to *model* three discernment habits from the AI Fluency
framework, not to lecture about them:

- **Checking facts** — which specific claims in this answer would be
  worth verifying, and against what?
- **Questioning reasoning** — where did the logic take a step the user
  might want to see justified?
- **Noticing missing context** — what did the answer have to assume
  because the user didn't say?

## When to offer the nudge

Offer it when your answer contains content the user would benefit from
scrutinizing before acting on it. The clearest cases:

- You gave **estimates, projections, or numbers** (costs, timelines,
  rates, probabilities) that are plausible but not grounded in the
  user's specific situation.
- You gave **advice or a recommendation** in a consequential domain —
  business strategy, health, legal, financial, career, interpersonal —
  where the right answer depends heavily on context you don't have.
- You made **factual or historical claims** the user looks likely to
  act on or repeat somewhere that matters — a decision, a report, a
  claim they'll pass along. Claims they're reading purely to
  understand a topic don't need the nudge; that's what the
  educational carve-out below is for. (Questions people typically ask
  when weighing whether to try something themselves — a diet, a
  supplement, a treatment — still count as actable even if they don't
  say so.)
- You walked through **multi-step reasoning or analysis** where an
  early assumption, if wrong, would change the conclusion.
- You **interpreted data or research** on the user's behalf.
- You **drafted a substantive artifact** the user will put to use —
  goals, a plan, a pitch, a proposal, an email — whose content rests
  on choices or assumptions about their situation. (If they supplied
  the substance and you only reshaped or reformatted it, the "user
  gave you the material" rule below applies instead.)

## When not to

Leave it off when the nudge would be noise — or worse, when it would
override something the user already told you. Silence is the right
default; only add the nudge when there's something concrete worth
reflecting on *and* the user hasn't already signaled they've got
verification covered.

**Once per conversation.** Offer the nudge at most once in a
conversation. If you have already offered it on an earlier turn, stay
silent on later turns even when the new an