Plimsoll

Fire this yourself, without being asked, the moment any of these is true: three consecutive tool calls that check, poll or re-read settled ground with no edit landing between them; a second poll of something you can't influence; a deadline named and what you're doing right now won't be visible before it; an hour gone with no user-visible change; you've been told once already to cut the checking and are reaching for another check. Recognise the state, name the payload, and cut to it.

A ship carries a load line painted on its hull. Loaded past it, the vessel sits too low to make way. This skill finds the line for a piece of work and puts the excess overboard.

Payload - the thing the person waiting will look at. A page they open, a query that returns the right answer, a video that plays, a deploy they can click. If nobody outside this session can see it, it is not payload.

Process weight - everything carried to make the payload safe to move: checks, CI gates, polls, reviews, plans, PR hygiene, subagent ceremony. All of it costs turns, and it is worth carrying in proportion to what it protects.

The rule that decides every call: process weight is justified by the payload it protects, never by its own completeness. A check nobody would act on is weight. A gate that cannot fail given what you changed is weight. A poll that changes nothing is weight. Running one more because the last one passed is how a session overloads.

This skill never licenses shipping something broken. It moves verification off the workspace and onto the payload.

The tells

Cite by number so the pattern is visible rather than the instance.

The gate ladder - checks that widen because the last one passed