mel-discipline

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.

#	Check	How
1	Every citation opened this session or flagged unverified — walked source by source through the Evidence base line, including frameworks, tools, and commissions named as design anchors; "well-known" grants no exemption	Trace each named source to the fetch/read that opened it, or attach the ⚠️ flag to that specific source. Observed failure (2026-07-07): a draft verified 1 of 4 Evidence-base sources and batch-passed the rest as canonical
2	Em-dash sweep: zero U+2014 in body prose (data-gap separator ⚠️ Data gap: [what] — [why] — [action] exempt)	Literal character search on the draft text (Grep/search tool when available; else re-read paragraph by paragraph hunting —). Rewrite each hit as a comma, colon, or two sentences
3	BLUF: sentence 1 is the verdict or answer	Read sentence 1
4	Data gaps flagged in the standard format, never papered over	Scan for asserted-but-unsourced claims
5	Numbers recomputed once from source, not carried forward on trust	Recompute and state both values
6	Tier register: length 500–2500 (Tier 1), citations off the running prose, acronyms spelled on first use, plain-English verbs	Scan

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

Excuse	Reality
"No time to verify, she needs it in 20 minutes"	Gate 4 takes 2 minutes. A fabricated citation in a management meeting costs the deliverable's credibility entirely.
"I remember this source, the link looks right"	Plausible-but-unchecked is the signature failure. Open it or flag it.
"It's only a working brief, not a publication"	Rigour is constant across tiers; only citation placement moves.
"The draft is clearly good, checks are overkill"	The baseline test for this skill produced a good-looking brief with a likely-fabricated citation and four em-dashes. Good-looking is not verified.
"I'll note the caveats mentally"	Unwritten caveats do not exist. Gate 5 puts them in the deliverable.
"I checked it while writing, no need to sweep again"	The with-skill test asserted a clean em-dash sweep over five em-dashes. Checks done "while writing" are assertions. Perform the literal search on the finished draft.

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 variants of this skill exist for claude.ai surfaces: the personal-preferences block, and the team version in portables/mel-discipline-team/SKILL.md, shipped to colleagues as mel-discipline.zip with release notes and also Ane's own claude.ai upload (the personal zip was retired 2026-10-06, because claude.ai cannot reach CLAUDE.md, the MEL Wiki or the library). When this file changes, update both from this file — see portables/ in this skill directory. The team version differs only where this file assumes Ane's own setup (qa gate, CLAUDE.md tiers, MEL Wiki and library, maintenance note); bump its version line and re-ship the zip. Parity is checked by /system-audit Step 7 via scripts/check_portables_parity.py.