Individual skill
from-first-principles
Strip a problem down to what's actually true — the physics, economics, and human basics — and rebuild the answer from there, ignoring 'how it's normally done'. Use when asked to think from first principles, why is this done this way, challenge the assumptions here, or rebuild this from scratch. Produces the problem reduced to its fundamental truths, the inherited assumptions and conventions named and questioned, and a solution reasoned up from the basics — which often looks nothing like the default because the default was just copied.
plugins/pm-thinking/skills/from-first-principles/SKILL.md
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# From First Principles
Most answers are reasoned by analogy — "this is how it's done, so we do it too." First-principles thinking throws that out: it breaks the problem down to what's *actually, physically, economically* true, then rebuilds from those basics. The result often diverges sharply from convention, because the convention was inherited, not derived.
## What This Skill Produces
- **The fundamentals** — the problem reduced to what's genuinely true (constraints from physics, math, economics, human needs), not what's assumed
- **The inherited assumptions** — the "that's just how it's done" beliefs, named and questioned (which are real constraints, which are just convention?)
- **The rebuild** — a solution reasoned upward from the fundamentals
- **The divergence** — where this differs from the default, and why the default existed anyway
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