precedent
Skill1 starsChanged 4 months agoMITView on GitHub
Precedent lookup before deciding. Greps prior rulings — the verdicts ledger, decision stores, the adjudicated escalation queue — for anything bearing on a pending decision, then either FOLLOWS the precedent or explicitly DISTINGUISHES the case. Use before any /door call, gate override, or decision in a domain the project has ruled on before. No silent departures.
3 other projects use a version of this.
Adopted by
Most recently taken up by
- Integralist/agent-skillstheir own version, first seen Nov 6, 2026
- useprecedent/precedenttheir own version, first seen Oct 17, 2026
- tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kittheir own version, first seen Sep 8, 2026
Other versions3 projects use a version of this.
Word for word · 0
None found.
Edited · 0
None found.
Wrote their own version · 3
- Integralist/agent-skills★ 23same name
- tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit★ 6same name
- useprecedent/precedent★ 1same name
How matches are found. Word for word: the exact same text. Edited: shares passages with this file (“99% same” means 99% of its five-word phrases also appear here; 10% or more counts). Their own version: similar meaning, or, weakest, the same name. We can’t tell which project had it first. Projects are counted among the 200 most-starred candidates, and mentions are links to the repository we found, up to 50 per site, so both counts are a floor.
The file
We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent
3 rules. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 2 are very specific to this project.
≈0
Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
≈1
Distinctive · estimate
This author's own choices. Worth a look.
2
Very specific
Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.
- Common
- Distinctive
- Very specific
- Very specific: line 36
If rulings conflict with each other, that's the finding — escalate the conflict via /escalate, don't pick a favorite.
- Distinctive: line 54
No silent departures. Any decision that contradicts a found ruling without a logged DISTINGUISH line is a judgment override — declare it …
- Very specific: line 58
If the same precedent gets distinguished three times, the ruling is wrong — send it to /escalate for re-adjudication instead of a fourth …
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
Files
/precedent — Has This Already Been Decided?
The ledger only compounds if it's consulted. A team that re-litigates settled questions wastes frontier effort; a team that silently contradicts its own rulings is worse — it has two answers in production. This skill makes the lookup mandatory and the departure explicit.
Invocation
/precedent uuid vs bigint for the new events table
/precedent # look up the decision currently under discussionProcedure
- Name the domain and 2–4 keywords for the pending decision (e.g. "ID
format":
uuid,bigint,pk,id). - Grep the ruling stores, in order:
.claude/verdicts.log— DOOR / GATE / ESCALATE lines.claude/escalation-queue.md## Adjudicatedsection — burned escalations- any project decisions store (DECISIONS_INDEX, docs/decisions/, a decisions DB)
Paste the matching lines. Zero hits in all three → verdict
none-found, decide fresh (via/doorif it's weighty) and move on.
- Cite what's found. Quote the ruling(s) verbatim with ref (date/ID/file).
If rulings conflict with each other, that's the finding — escalate the
conflict via
/escalate, don't pick a favorite. - Follow or distinguish — exactly one:
- FOLLOW — apply the prior ruling. One line saying so. Done; this is the cheap, common case.
- DISTINGUISH — state the material difference between this case and the precedent's facts, in one or two sentences. "It feels different" and "that was a while ago" are not material differences; changed constraints, changed scale, or a ruling whose kill-gate has since tripped are.
- Verdict line (log via
/verdict):PRECEDENT: followed <ref>orPRECEDENT: distinguished <ref> — <material difference>orPRECEDENT: none-found.
Rules
- No silent departures. Any decision that contradicts a found ruling without a logged DISTINGUISH line is a judgment override — declare it (see the Judgment override rule in the repo CLAUDE.md).
- A DISTINGUISH is itself precedent: it narrows the old ruling. Log it.
- If the same precedent gets distinguished three times, the ruling is wrong —
send it to
/escalatefor re-adjudication instead of a fourth carve-out.
Composes with
/door— run this first; a found precedent often collapses a one-way-door analysis to FOLLOW. No precedent on a one-way door is an/escalatetrigger./verdict— the primary store this greps, and where its own verdicts land./escalate— conflicting or thrice-distinguished precedents go there.
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