AI Skill: First Principles Reasoning

Purpose

Equip an agent with the capability to reduce a problem to foundational truths and recombine them into novel solutions.

When to Use

• Deep innovation tasks
• Complex constraint problems
• When analogical or inherited reasoning fails

Skill Description

This skill instructs the agent to:

1. Identify fundamental principles underlying a problem.
2. Break assumptions through techniques like Socratic questioning or Five‑Whys.
3. Rebuild solution‑space from the bottom up.

Input

• Target problem
• Ontological assumptions (if any)

Output

• Base principles
• Derived solution hypotheses

Technique

Perform iterative questioning to reveal foundational truths, then synthesize them into novel configurations.