skills/.changeset/negation-and-negative-space.md
Matt Pocock 30afefecc9 changeset for Negation and Negative Space failure modes
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-06 13:56:16 +01:00

958 B

mattpocock-skills
minor

Add two adjacent Steering failure modes to writing-great-skills, both about how language you think of as "off" still steers the agent. Negation — the elephant — is steering by prohibition: naming what not to do drags the forbidden behaviour into context and makes it more available, not less (don't think of an elephant), so the cure is to prompt the positive. Negative Space — the void — is blindness to the steering done by what you leave out: every decision a skill declines is delegated to the agent's priors rather than left neutral, so the cure is to read a draft for its silences and decide each omission deliberately (fill it, or leave it open as a real branch). Kept as two entries, not one — they carry different diagnostics and different cures — each a full GLOSSARY.md entry plus a SKILL.md failure-mode bullet, matching how every other failure mode is carried.