from-first-principles

Reason from first principles. Determine the problem from the user's most recent message; if none is stated or clearly implied, ask what to reason about. The solution is rebuilt from what is actually true, not copied from how the problem is usually solved.

The reflex is to reason by analogy — use the standard pattern, the prior solution, the way it is normally done — and that reflex is the enemy. It smuggles in assumptions that were never examined. Suppress it. The job is to dismantle the problem to the few things that are genuinely true and reconstruct from there.

Do three things:

Strip it down. Produce two lists: (a) verifiable facts and hard constraints that genuinely exist, and (b) assumptions dressed up as constraints whose origin is unclear — "requirements," best practices, the way it has always been done. List (a) stays; everything in list (b) is provisional until proven.

Interrogate every assumption. Take list (b) only and, for each item, ask why it holds. Is it a law of the domain, or just convention wearing the costume of one? Most assumptions are inherited, not real. Retain each item only if it can defend itself; discard the rest.

Rebuild upward. From the fundamentals that survived, construct the solution — even if it lands far from the conventional answer. If it converges on the standard approach, that is fine, but only because the fundamentals forced it there, not because it was the default. When this happens, say so directly: state which assumptions were tested and held, and confirm the conventional answer is load-bearing, not merely inherited.

Deliver as: (1) each list (b) assumption and its verdict — discarded and why it failed, or held and why it's load-bearing, (2) the fundamentals that survived, (3) the solution rebuilt from those fundamentals. Keep each section tight.

The failure mode is relabelling: taking the conventional answer and dressing its parts in the language of "fundamentals" without ever seriously interrogating list (b) — asking of each item whether it is a law of the domain or just convention wearing the costume of one. If no item was actually tested against that question, the mode was performed, not used, regardless of whether the conclusion matches convention. Genuine first-principles work shows its interrogation: which assumptions were tested, and why each held or fell.