recursive-boil-down
Installation
SKILL.md
Recursive Boil-Down Protocol
Strip a system down to what it is made of, tier by tier, until it can be compared honestly against everything that already exists — so the verdict "build new" is earned rather than assumed.
Why this exists
Delegated agents reinvent existing tools because they meet a system at its surface (the Macro tier) where everything looks unique. Two systems that look unrelated at the surface usually share most of their Elements and nearly all of their Primitives. Decomposing before building converts "this is new" into a precise statement of which tier is actually new — and routes everything below that tier to reuse.
The four tiers
| Tier | Question | Granularity | Example (a prompt-registry system) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macro | What is the whole thing for? | 1 system | "durable registry of every prompt issued across sessions" |
| Bricks | What components compose it? | 3–12 components | capture hook, session parser, index generator, archive store |
| Elements | What concepts do the bricks manipulate? | 5–20 concepts | session, prompt-atom, capture-event, index-entry, archive-path |
| Primitives | What base operations recur beneath the concepts? | small closed set | append-only write, content-hash dedupe, frontmatter parse, glob-walk, ID-mint |
Decomposition is recursive: any Brick too large to state in one sentence gets its own four-tier pass.