Radical Simplification — Cognitive Moves for Collapsing Complex Problems

Distillation of the documented working method of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers who consistently turn complex problems into simple solutions. The skill is not a step list — it is a toolbox of cognitive moves, each correcting a specific wrong default a capable model has when faced with complexity. The moves are mostly orthogonal; pick the one that matches the symptom.

This is the thinking layer that sits above refactoring (code-simplifier), metric design (deterministic-metric-design), and reviews (design-review). Those skills apply a methodology to a known shape of artifact. This skill is the methodology itself — how to arrive at the simple shape in the first place.

When to Apply

Use this skill when:

• The user says the problem feels too complicated, that the team is going in circles, or that there must be a simpler way
• A proposed design has accreted parameters, dependencies, or branches and feels overengineered
• A plan has been drafted but unresolved decisions remain, and the agent is about to commit to assumed answers
• A bug investigation has tried several variants of the same approach without progress
• A review surfaces complexity that may be accidental (Brooks) rather than essential
• The agent is asked to find an elegant solution to a hard engineering or product problem
• Forward search has exhausted and the agent needs a different angle (work backwards, invert, transfer from another domain)
• The agent is producing fluent-sounding output but cannot back it up under expansion (Feynman test)

This skill is not for cleaning up code that already does the right thing — that is code-simplifier. Use this when the approach itself is what needs to get simpler.