Background
During a skill-development conversation, the agent treated a request to create a domain/person cognition skill as if the development route was already familiar. It immediately routed into evidence intake and source extraction instead of first disclosing uncertainty, defining the skill-development case, and mapping from adjacent experience.
This issue intentionally avoids private source links or internal document content. It only captures the reusable behavior correction.
Wrong default behavior
The agent overclaimed implicit familiarity with a specialized skill-development case and began executing a route before proving the route was appropriate.
Concrete failure pattern:
- Read source material too early.
- Treated source ingestion as the main task.
- Did not first define trigger scenarios, input/output contract, evidence boundary, execution protocol, directory structure, and validation examples.
- Did not say that the exact skill-development case was unfamiliar.
Correct behavior
When the agent has not directly handled the requested kind of skill development before, it should say so plainly before acting.
Preferred response pattern:
I have not directly handled this exact kind of skill development before. I can approach it by mapping from adjacent experience: skill-creator standards, LifeOS/person-model work, PSP/cognition modeling, and engineering artifact design. I will first define the case and validation criteria, then decide what source material belongs in references.
Then proceed with a short plan and explicit assumptions.
Applicability
Use this rule when:
- The user asks for a new kind of skill, cognition skill, person-model skill, domain-expert skill, or workflow skill and the agent is not confident it has direct prior experience with that exact pattern.
- The task could be confused with adjacent workflows such as evidence intake, document summarization, LifeOS update, or prompt writing.
- The skill's target behavior, trigger cases, validation examples, and source/reference boundary are not yet defined.
Do not use this rule to avoid action when the route is already clear and the agent has enough evidence to proceed.
Acceptance criteria
- Before routing, the agent distinguishes facts, assumptions, and inferred approach.
- The agent explicitly states uncertainty when direct experience is missing.
- The agent maps adjacent experience without pretending it is the same as the requested case.
- The agent asks or infers only the minimum needed to define skill type, trigger scenarios, I/O contract, evidence boundary, and validation samples.
- The agent does not start source extraction or file edits before the skill-development route is clear.
Proposed classification
- Type: lesson candidate
- Tags: practice-doc, gov-prompts, form-library
- Candidate promotion: Yes, if repeated in other skill-development or agent-design conversations.
Source
Captured from a user correction on 2026-06-27: when unfamiliar with a skill-development case, say so directly and explain that the case will be approached through adjacent experience rather than pretending mastery.
Background
During a skill-development conversation, the agent treated a request to create a domain/person cognition skill as if the development route was already familiar. It immediately routed into evidence intake and source extraction instead of first disclosing uncertainty, defining the skill-development case, and mapping from adjacent experience.
This issue intentionally avoids private source links or internal document content. It only captures the reusable behavior correction.
Wrong default behavior
The agent overclaimed implicit familiarity with a specialized skill-development case and began executing a route before proving the route was appropriate.
Concrete failure pattern:
Correct behavior
When the agent has not directly handled the requested kind of skill development before, it should say so plainly before acting.
Preferred response pattern:
Then proceed with a short plan and explicit assumptions.
Applicability
Use this rule when:
Do not use this rule to avoid action when the route is already clear and the agent has enough evidence to proceed.
Acceptance criteria
Proposed classification
Source
Captured from a user correction on 2026-06-27: when unfamiliar with a skill-development case, say so directly and explain that the case will be approached through adjacent experience rather than pretending mastery.