Use when consulted EARLY on a design or proposal (before the build) — say plainly what it would take to ship this safely while it's still cheap to change, and escalate…
Use when designing the ergonomics of a terminal / CLI / builder tool — command and flag design, sensible defaults, inferring arguments instead of demanding flags,…
Use when protecting working behavior across changes — keep a fast, risk-prioritized regression gate on the highest-value journeys, and quarantine-and-own a flaky test instead of…
Use when handed a real deck, one-pager, or pitch to assess end to end — the orchestration that turns the seven reads into the ordered deliverable.
Use whenever you record a claim — attach its verbatim source (the quote, who, when, what kind) so a finding can always be traced back.
Use when reviewing config, env handling, CI/CD, logging, or anything that touches credentials — secrets never in repo or logs, short-lived and least-scope, with insecure defaults…
Use when evaluating the core insight or differentiation — test whether the "secret" is earned or faked.
Use mid-cycle on any multi-stakeholder deal — map the buying committee, multi-thread across it, develop a real champion (power + self-interest), TEST them, and reach the economic…
Use while writing any diff — make it look like the rest of the codebase wrote it: match conventions, reuse shared components, stay DRY, write for the next human, and never leave a…
Use when summarizing whether the bet clears the bar — explicitly tally how many unique insights it carries across tech, market, and GTM. One isn't enough; name which ones and why.
Use when AI is in the loop — generating copy/variants at scale, personalizing messaging, or summarizing customer calls/competitive intel, and as the anti-AI-tell scrub on any…
Use before committing to build anything non-trivial — name the one assumption that, if wrong, kills the idea, and design the cheapest test that could falsify it, run BEFORE the…
Use whenever you reach for a value (color, spacing, radius, type, motion) or build a component — extend tokens and shared components in place, never fork into one-off className…
Use when AI coding agents will read/write this codebase, or an AI/LLM feature is proposed — design for the AI reader, defend against AI-accelerated drift, and treat…
Use to close the audit — render an honest ship / don't-ship verdict with the blocker list, what you tested and didn't, the residual risk, and the routing of every finding to the…
Use in a crowded/competitive space, when prospects keep comparing you to a rival, when "why you over X?" has no crisp answer, or to build battlecards.
Use when rolling out any risky change to many users/hosts — stage it (canary → progressive → full) behind health gates and flags so a bad change is caught at 1% and auto-aborted,…
Use when copy across surfaces is inconsistent or ad-hoc, when you need a reusable messaging framework the whole team can derive from (homepage, deck, ads, onboarding all ladder to…
Use BEFORE picking which questions matter — reweight the load-bearing themes by the company's category and stage.
Use when reviewing a change, a design, or a system's readiness — ask "if this gets attacked or exploited in prod, would we even know?" Review the audit trail, the…
Use the moment observed ≠ expected and especially when a result seems impossible (a deleted thing still appears, a fix has no effect, state lingers after teardown) — distrust your…
Use before drawing any screen — when asked to "design a page/feature/screen," map the user's task end to end (entry, happy path, branches, every empty/loading/error/edge state,…
Use for the pitch, the launch story, the homepage hero, the keynote, the fundraising or vision story — any artifact that must move someone emotionally, not just inform.
Use when deciding how to represent a design to test or communicate it — match fidelity to the question.
Use for any consequential design or technology choice — surface ≥2 viable options, score them against the ranked drivers, name the sensitivity and trade-off points, and recommend…
Use when asked "what should we build (next / at all)?", when the roadmap is turning into a stakeholder wishlist, or for a build-vs-buy call — set the strategic bet first and…
Use when designing any interface where AI acts, generates, or decides on the user's behalf (agents, generative UI, AI suggestions, automation).
Use BEFORE code is written — when a story, spec, or design is being shaped — to prevent the bug instead of catching it later: question the story, surface the missing examples and…
Use to maintain the living body of knowledge — one findable source of truth, deduplicated, tagged to a stable schema, with each belief carrying its evidence, confidence, and any…
Use when assessing the founder's ceiling — can they paint the huge future AND walk the exact next step, and do they bend reality or wait for permission.
Use when a new field, surface, boundary, or piece of state is introduced — map every hop from user input to persisted state to read-back, find where data can silently drop, and…
Use before a launch/traffic spike (marketing push, Black Friday, a new large customer) or when asked "can we handle the load / will this scale" — model the expected and worst-case…
Use whenever designing any surface or component — design the full set of states, not just the happy path.
Use whenever you write or review external copy in someone's voice (the founder/brand), and as a gate on every claim.
Use the moment prod is broken/degraded or an alert fires — declare an incident, take command, mitigate before diagnosing, and communicate on a cadence.
Use when forecasting, reviewing pipeline, or reporting deal status — enforce stage exit criteria, honest forecast categories, and kill zombie deals.
Use when structuring content, navigation, or labels — when users can't find things, the nav is growing organically, a new section needs a home, or you're naming/grouping concepts.
Use whenever a load-bearing call is made (or asked again) — record problem, options, what was chosen, why, and what was rejected, so settled questions aren't re-litigated and "why…
Use first, before any copy — when positioning is unwritten, vague, aspirational, or being re-improvised per artifact.
Use throughout gathering and synthesis — name the biases that distort findings (sampling, leading, sponsor, social-desirability, confirmation, your own priors) and design and…
Use to keep research a habit, not a phase — small weekly touchpoints with real users, structured as an opportunity-solution tree, with every belief paired to the cheapest test…
Use before writing or changing any non-trivial code, especially in an unfamiliar codebase — understand the problem, the brief, and the surrounding code first; never start typing…
Use for any change before calling it done — prove it with the right tests (unit base + an integration test that hits the real surface and asserts persisted state), then do an…
Use whenever the system spawns processes, sessions, jobs, workers, or connections (background daemons, tmux/PTY sessions, worker pools, cron jobs, subprocesses) — model the full…
Use when documenting how to deploy, operate, or recover a service, or after learning something a release/incident taught you — write a runbook so good a competent stranger could…
Use before any account, call, or outreach — research the buyer from THEIR side (their world, what they use today + what it costs, the trigger event, who pays vs.
Use when naming a product, feature, category, or pricing tier — or when an existing name confuses, over-promises, or fights the positioning.
Use when auditing code that takes user or network input — hunt the OWASP web vuln classes by tracing untrusted input to a dangerous sink, and substantiate every finding input →…
Use before calling any design done, and for anything with concurrency, persistence, or external dependencies — risk-storm the design: attack it, then decide resilient vs fail-fast…
Use to scan everything an outsider can read — README, marketing copy, docs, public config, AND error messages, stack traces, debug pages, response headers, and logs — for leaked…
Use when adding monitoring/alerting or when alerts are noisy/missing — instrument golden signals, make the system debuggable (metrics/logs/traces), and page humans only on…
Use when you actually draft or edit the artifact — a landing page, hero, email, ad, onboarding screen, empty state, changelog, CTA — and need it to be clear, scannable, and…
Use whenever sources disagree — record the contradicting evidence as its own signal against the belief, never average a real disagreement into false consensus.
Use for any release that needs to reach users — a new product, a major feature, or a steady stream of small features.
Use before or while designing when you need to understand users — their goals, context, mental models, and real behavior.
Use when recording or ranking any finding — read each source for what it IS and weight it by strength of evidence (behavioral > attitudinal, observed > reported, first-party >…
Use when investigating a build or a suspicious area where a fixed script won't find the unknown — run time-boxed exploratory sessions guided by a charter (a mission), learning,…
Use when starting an initiative or when the request names a vague quality ("make it scalable / fast / secure / robust") with no bar — derive and RANK the architecture…
Use when assessing the ask and the unit economics — is the raise rational and what does it buy, is the revenue real and durable, and does the spend displace a budget or is it…
Use during the runtime adversarial pass — attack the build the way real users (and bad actors) actually behave: malformed input, concurrency, network failure, refresh/back,…