First-Principles Thinking

Use first-principles thinking to replace inherited stories and conventions with a model of what is actually known, then rebuild and test from there. The objective is not to be right every time; it is to learn quickly why an idea is wrong or right. AI performs the analysis while making the result inspectable: evidence, assumptions, uncertainty, dependencies, and decision criteria should be explicit. The user remains the decision maker and keeps the judgment.

The D.A.R.E. framework

D.A.R.E. is a four-step prompt chain:

1. D — Decompose: Break the problem into its smallest useful constituent parts.
2. A — Audit assumptions: Identify and question the inherited assumptions in those parts.
3. R — Recombine facts: Assemble new solutions only from building blocks that survived the audit.
4. E — Experiment against reality: Design the smallest, cheapest, fastest real-world tests.

Run the stages in order. Do not jump to solutions during decomposition or to implementation before testing. At every stage, make the reasoning visible enough for the user to inspect.

Each prompt follows AIM: