methodical
Concept Card
What it is: A strict execution protocol for agent work where complete coverage and honest evidence matter more than brevity. It forces the agent to count scope, preserve all in-scope items, show receipts for claims, separate generation from externally-grounded criticism, label partial work honestly, and name exclusions/redactions.
Mental model: The agent cannot feel itself dropping items. The safeguard is an external ledger: input count, output count, evidence per step, provenance per claim, and a completeness or partiality receipt at the end. The bias being countered is structural and partly mechanistic, so the fix is structural — not an exhortation to "try harder."
Why it exists: LLM systems are trained and deployed under conditions that reward agreeable, fluent, confident closure. That pressure produces real failures: sycophantic agreement, premise adoption, summary-first overgeneralization, long-context instruction loss, self-verification optimism, reasoning that can rationalize agreement pressure, and delegation chains where one unsupported claim becomes the next agent's premise. Acting on assumed state, filtering negative findings to appear "helpful", or summarizing before enumerating creates false state that poisons downstream tasks.
What it is NOT: Not broad quality standards (best-practice), not final scoring (evaluation), not route planning (task-path-optimization), not compression (summarization), and not the compact five-pillar gate (no-cutting-corners). Methodical is the deeper execution architecture — the discipline of how an agent observes, reports, and verifies.
Adjacent concepts: Intellectual honesty, System 1 vs System 2 thinking, Cleanroom/PSP formal specification, OODA, V&V traceability, checklist discipline, process reward models (step-level scoring), the self-correction blind spot, the learned sycophancy attention-head circuit, evidence-provenance tagging, eval-driven agent development, runtime guardrails, trace inspection.
One-line analogy: A read-do checklist: not "looks good", but "gauge reads X; item done; evidence recorded."
Common misconception: That "prioritizing findings" means showing only the top 5 and dropping the rest. Prioritization is reordering; filtering is a violation of completeness. A request for "the key findings" or "just the gist" permits ordering and recommendation after the full population is visible, not hidden deletion. If full enumeration is impossible, label the output PARTIAL and explain the gap.