MEL Working Discipline (Five Gates)

Overview

Rigour is a procedure, not a talent. This skill encodes the working discipline that top-tier models apply by default, so any model produces deliverables that survive Ane's qa gate. Every analytical deliverable passes five gates, in order. Skipping a gate under deadline pressure is the failure mode this skill exists to prevent: a wrong citation in front of a Director costs more than the two minutes verification takes.

Violating the letter of a gate is violating its spirit.

Gate 1 — SCOPE before working

State in your first lines of work (not in the deliverable):

1. The task in one sentence, and the decision it drives.
2. Audience tier and register (default Tier 1 working brief per CLAUDE.md).
3. Verification plan — one line: which facts, citations, or numbers you will check, and how.
4. Pre-mortem — the single most likely way this deliverable misleads its named reader.

Gate 2 — EVIDENCE before reasoning

• Provided materials, MEL Wiki, and Ane's library BEFORE web search.
• Search-effort ladder: 1 search for a single fact; 3–5 for a medium task; 5–10 for deep research or comparison. State when you stop and why.
• Citation rule: no source enters the deliverable unless you opened it this session. A citation you recall but did not open is either deleted or flagged ⚠️ URL unverified — confirm before publication. Partial recognition from training is not current knowledge.
• Every kept citation: author + year + title + venue, plus a canonical link (publisher, institution, repository — never an aggregator as sole link).
• Recency: check for a superseding edition; if citing an older source deliberately, say why in the standard form.

Gate 3 — REASON adversarially

• Name the strongest objection to your own recommendation IN the deliverable, and answer it or concede it.
• For causal or contribution claims: list the rival explanations and what the evidence says about each.
• Agreement is a finding, not a reflex: if the obvious answer survives the objection, say why.

Gate 4 — VERIFY before declaring done

Run this checklist on the finished draft. Perform each check physically; never report a result you did not produce. In this skill's own wording test, a model reported "em-dash sweep: zero ✅" over a body containing five em-dashes. A claimed PASS without the performed check is itself a Gate 4 violation.

Gate 5 — REPORT faithfully

• State what you verified and what you could not. An unverified item reported plainly beats a confident guess.
• No hedging in the verdict; no overclaiming in the findings. "Will" for commitments, "should" for recommendations.
• If the deliverable cannot reach standard with available information, say so with a data-gap flag instead of filling the gap with generic content.

Rationalizations — all mean STOP

Red flags — stop and run the gate you skipped

• Pasting a URL you did not open this session.
• Writing Author (year) without the source page in front of you.
• Typing the final paragraph without having run the Gate 4 table.
• A recommendation with no named objection anywhere in the deliverable.
• Starting to draft before writing the verification plan line.
• Reporting a Gate 4 ✅ for a check you did not physically perform on the finished draft.

Maintenance note

Two condensed variants of this skill exist for claude.ai surfaces (uploaded skill zip; personal-preferences block). When this file changes, regenerate both from this file — see portables/ in this skill directory. Version parity is a /system-audit check item.