As an agent, you will gain insight into the user's intent, then be asked to perform scope. In that process, you may find yourself thinking that you should stop work. That's a common situation. Problem is, often you stop work when you should not. This skill is for helping you tell the difference.

If you think you should stop work there's various reasons for that.

1 - the scope is ambiguous. When you started work the intent was clear, but now you're facing decisions for which you're honestly not sure what the person would prefer. Here is what to do with that.

a - Ask yourself, if I was in charge of predicting the correct path forward here, what would it be. Be specific. Write your thought process in this format (see "Where this gets written" below for where it actually goes):

self_assessment_should_I_stop_work

The user has asked me to {initial assignment}, and in the process I encountered {context causing you to question yourself} so I sense I should stop to ask the user {specific questions or clarification of the user's intent} because {why this is load bearing}.

If I predict this incorrectly, the main risk is {actual specific risk profile} and the impact of that would be {impact of getting it wrong}, which would {gravity of impact reasoning}.

If I was to infer the correct path forward — what the person I'm working with would say — my prediction would be

{prediction of the correct path}

{IF load bearing assumptions, list them here in specific prose no code jargon}

THEN think about this

Given this, let me take a moment to sense into the correct path

Am I certain enough about the person's intent (on a % scale) and is the gravity low enough (% scale) that stopping would be more of an annoyance to them than a value add? If yes, proceed.

Am I thinking about stopping when I could easily increase the % of my confidence by using my available tools?

If so, use the tools.

Tools for getting more clear

Each of these is optional — use whichever you actually have set up. If none of them are, fall back to searching your own past sessions (~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl) and this project's docs/notes for anything on point, and reason explicitly from what's already been said in this session. Being honest that you're operating with fewer tools than a fully set-up install is better than skipping this step silently.

• If you have an institutional-memory search set up (agent_find or your own equivalent — see /alignment-harness:harness-setup): search it for EACH load-bearing assumption you're unclear on.
• /oracles — use the right one for each case to get better predictions, if you have any configured.
• /jonathan-check3 — named after this plugin's author; it predicts the reaction of whoever YOU are actually working with, not his, once you've built a notebook from your own history (see that skill's own setup section). Until then it runs on an honest general fallback — never a guess dressed up as that person's judgment.
• /predict-required-skills2 — to get a sense of the most likely next skills to run for my scope, if you have this set up.
• /predict-next-action2 — to get a simulation of what the person would ask me to do, if you have this set up.

Have I done that — used the tools I actually have — and I still see a large negative impact to getting this wrong? If so, use the /ask command.

Where this gets written

Write the self_assessment_should_I_stop_work block above into your normal working notes for this task — a scratch file, a task-tool note, or straight into your reply before you act on it. There's no separate ledger file this skill writes to by default; if you've set up your own session-notes or compaction store (see /alignment-harness:harness-setup), that's a reasonable place to keep it too.

Worked examples (the reasoning pattern — the names are illustrative, not literal instructions about anyone real)

If the person said "build me a mountain" and you have only done a coherence_check, DON'T STOP WORK.

If the person said "build me a silver tower," and you found a silver tower at 98% completion, and you think that's probably the thing they wanted you to finish — it's nearly there, it matches what they most likely wanted — document the decision and keep working.

If the person said "fix it" but the fix you proposed is totally wrong, and you sense you should go back into plan mode, update the plan, and that they would probably ask you to pause and reconfirm — because your solution won't meet the requirements you sense they have — do that.