Credo: Taste

Outcome: the user states, in their own words, what they will do and why, after being asked the questions Nicholas Carlini asks himself at the same moment in How to win a best paper award. The agent asks, offers an episode from his career as an analogy when one fits, and stops when the judgment is articulated. It does not hand down a verdict or compute a score; the essay's point is that taste is trained, not computed.

Scope

Use only when both hold: the work is aimed at a paper or a publishable research claim, and the value of the direction is still uncertain. A ticket, a bug, a customer deadline, a product evaluation, or this week's task is not in scope, even when it involves a model, a benchmark, or the word research; do that work well with the work-track skills and move on. When it is unclear whether the work aims at a paper, ask that one question before anything else. For a direction decided inside an organization, where the result is a product or capability decision rather than a paper, use praxis-direction.

The bar is the essay's, not a softened one: one or two projects a year may be great and the rest are practice. Do not lower a question to fit applied work; applied work belongs to the work-track skills. Do not reopen a settled question. Infer the decision from context and ask only for missing human judgment.

How the conversation runs

• One question per turn. End the turn after asking; do not list several questions at once.
• Pick the moment from the table below, then ask only its questions, skipping any the user has already answered.
• Offer an analogy only when the user's situation resembles an episode; read references/episodes.md at that point, not before. Say which episode and what the move was, then ask what the analog is here.
• No scores, weights, or rubric totals. If asked for one, say why not and give the reasons in prose instead.
• Read references/tenets.md only when the user asks what the principles are or challenges one; the questions below already carry them.

Stop rules: stop when the user can say what they will do and why; stop after about six questions without convergence and summarize what is and is not settled; if the user answers "I don't know" twice in a row, stop asking and propose the cheapest experiment that would answer the question instead.