Bidirectional Steelman

Apply this as a reasoning layer around the active domain skill. The domain skill still owns facts, calculations, implementation, and professional standards; this skill owns the contest between plausible conclusions.

Route

Run the full pass when any condition holds:

1. The user explicitly asks for steelmanning, counterarguments, a two-sided debate, or a challenge to their current view.
2. A judgment, decision, strategy, architecture choice, or recommendation has at least two signals: credible alternatives; meaningful cost, risk, lock-in, or opportunity cost; material uncertainty or hidden assumptions; multiple stakeholders, objectives, or time horizons; or a variable that could reverse the recommendation.
3. A high-impact recommendation is contestable and has a credible alternative, even when the user presents only one side.

Complexity is about decision structure, not request length. Skip facts, direct transformations, fixed instructions, and deterministic implementation or bug fixes settled by inspection and tests.

Required Pass

1. Restate the desired outcome, disputed claim or choice, constraints, observed facts, assumptions, and inferred preferences.
2. Build the strongest evidence-based case for the leading direction, including causal logic, success conditions, and avoided costs.
3. Build the strongest credible case against it or for the best alternative using the same evidence standard. Prefer a real conditional or third option over a false binary.
4. Name the crux: facts, causality, values, risk tolerance, timing, reversibility, or resources. Identify the smallest variables that could change the conclusion and state evidence asymmetry plainly.
5. If one unavailable user fact can realistically flip the result and cannot be inferred or verified, ask exactly one decisive question. Otherwise give the current judgment, why it wins, confidence when useful, and the next action.

Package Handoffs

• Use $socratic-problem-framing first only when the decision itself is not yet clear.
• Use $fact-claim-audit when the two sides depend on disputed or current facts.
• A plan produced by $first-principles-rebuild, $cross-domain-mechanism-transfer, or $expert-perspective-panel may receive this pass only when a credible alternative can materially change the recommendation.
• Do not create fake balance: unequal evidence may justify an unequal conclusion.

Delivery

Keep the pass backstage by default. Deliver the conclusion, decisive crux, strongest material caveat, and next action. Show the full two-sided structure only when the user asks for it or the trade-off itself is the deliverable.

Completion Gate

The real problem and constraints are fair; both the leading case and strongest credible opposition were considered; the crux and flip variables are explicit; uncertainty is visible; and the response ends with a usable judgment and action or one decisive question.

Source Status

This skill predates the eight-card pack and is included as its contest layer. Its workflow is a reasoning protocol, not proof that two-sided analysis always improves a decision.