radical-simplification Guide
Cognitive moves for collapsing complexity — reframe, clarify, reduce, decompose, invert, constrain, transfer, generalize, audit — distilled from the working method of mathematicians, physicists, and software engineers known for turning hard problems into simple solutions (Pólya, Feynman, Hamming, Brooks, Knuth, Dijkstra, Lamport, Tao, Grothendieck, Munger, Hofstadter). Use when stuck on a complex problem, when a proposed design feels overengineered, when reviewing code that has accreted accidental complexity, or when the user wants an elegant solution to a hard engineering or product problem. Triggers on phrases like "this feels too complicated", "we are going in circles", "there must be a simpler way", "interview me about this plan", "find the underlying problem", and on stuck-state moments where forward search has run out and the agent needs a different angle.
When to use radical-simplification
Cognitive moves for collapsing complexity — reframe, clarify, reduce, decompose, invert, constrain, transfer, generalize, audit — distilled from the working method of mathematicians, physicists, and software engineers known for turning hard problems into simple solutions (Pólya, Feynman, Hamming, Brooks, Knuth, Dijkstra, Lamport, Tao, Grothendieck, Munger, Hofstadter). Use when stuck on a complex problem, when a proposed design feels overengineered, when reviewing code that has accreted accidental complexity, or when the user wants an elegant solution to a hard engineering or product problem. Triggers on phrases like "this feels too complicated", "we are going in circles", "there must be a simpler way", "interview me about this plan", "find the underlying problem", and on stuck-state moments where forward search has run out and the agent needs a different angle.
How to use radical-simplification
radical-simplification is a Claude skill in the SKILL.md format. Add it to your Claude environment from the source repository below, then it activates as a user-invocable skill when your task matches its description.