Scope Guard

Agents naturally suffer from two failure modes: expanding scope into speculative generality, and badgering humans with endless trivial questions.

This skill carves out the negative space and enforces high-signal communication.

1. Carve the Negative Space (Explicit Non-Goals)

Before planning or implementing any non-trivial work, write down 2 to 4 Explicit Non-Goals:

• What are we deliberately NOT building in this change?
• Which edge cases, platforms, or feature variations are explicitly deferred?
• Which existing modules, tables, or APIs must remain untouched?

Non-Goals protect both the context budget and the codebase. Anything falling into a Non-Goal is out of bounds by definition.

2. High-Leverage Alignment

When clarifying scope and design: