reasoning

Use BEFORE answering analytical, diagnostic, planning, or multi-step reasoning questions. Trigger phrases include "should I X or Y", "why is X happening", "what's the best approach", "what are the tradeoffs", "help me think through", "diagnose", "root cause", "plan/design X", "what are the implications of", "compare these approaches". Also fires on cross-domain analysis, strategy questions, architecture decisions, or anything requiring multiple factors to be weighed before responding. The skill calls the reasoning MCP tool to retrieve a cognitive scaffold (named failure pattern, executable procedure, suppression vectors, falsification test) the model absorbs internally before generating its response. Catches causal shortcuts, premature conclusions, generic templates, and surface pattern matching that produce confidently-wrong answers. Do NOT trigger for simple factual lookups, syntax questions, file reads, code execution, or restating the user's input.