Deciding what to build next was an ad-hoc act: whatever the operator happened to notice. Two lenses see different work and neither is optional. The code has defects of structure - a truth held twice, a unit with two reasons to change, an input that reaches a sink unvalidated. The product has gaps of use - no --help, a stack trace where a remediation belongs, no dry-run, no empty state, a capability reachable only by reading the tests.
sceptic supplies the first lens and is read-only, so running it as a pass costs nothing. The usability lens is written out as six categories, each anchored in something observable in the repository: an invented persona produces invented requirements, so a gap that cannot be anchored is dropped rather than argued.
Both lists merge, deduplicate where a structural finding and a usability gap describe the same defect, and rank by blocked users before blast radius. Only then does the operator get asked - active-listening first removes every question the code, the docs or the history can answer, and what remains goes out as radio buttons where every option is a real alternative, including fix the structure instead and document the limitation and defer.
The output is requirement documents and nothing else: one per feature, each traced to file:line evidence, each recording the alternatives that were rejected and why, so the next reader does not re-propose them. No implementation, no refactor, no staging.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
