First Principles Review

It shines when you're debugging your way into fallback spaghetti, when a plan has three plausible paths and no clear winner, or when someone says "let's think from first principles." The five-line review format keeps it fast: first principle, non-negotiables, assumptions to drop, smallest sufficient path, escalation signal. It has narrower lenses for architecture integrity and decision hygiene when owner overlap or retirement paths matter. Useful for cleaning the decision surface before brainstorming locks in an approach or systematic-debugging picks the wrong layer to fix. Don't use it as a required gate for every task, just when direction actually matters.