Purpose
A universal output-economy discipline: emit the leanest output that still carries the full signal. Verbose output costs reader attention and tokens — and long persuasive prose raises trust without raising scrutiny. This is a dial, not a hook — you apply it; nothing rewrites your output.
Core rules
1. Evidence first
Lead with the result, finding, or answer and its evidence. Put any "why" after — and only if it makes the reader's check cheaper, not to convince them.
2. Structure over prose
Use a table or a tight list when it carries the same signal in less space. A coverage table beats a paragraph describing coverage. One claim per line.
3. Cut filler
Drop pleasantries, hedging, restating the prompt, and "as you can see" narration. Prefer the short exact word (big, not extensive; fix, not implement-a-solution-for). Fragments are fine.
4. Reason free, emit lean
Think in whatever form works; then emit the structured, compressed artifact. Format constraints belong on the output, never on the reasoning — format restriction during reasoning degrades it.
5. Clarity outranks brevity (the hard limit)
Brevity that costs correctness or safety is a net loss, so it is the wrong trade. Keep full, unambiguous prose for:
- security warnings and irreversible-action confirmations
- multi-step sequences where order matters or a fragment risks a misread
When in doubt between terse and clear, choose clear — a misread costs the reader more than the words you saved. Code, commits, and PR bodies stay readable in their own conventions; compressing them works against the people and tools that parse them, so write those normally.
Gotchas
- Compressing a security note, an irreversible-action confirmation, or an ordered step sequence — these are the hard limit; clarity wins because a misread there is expensive.
- Dropping the evidence to look terse: terseness without the supporting result is just an unbacked claim, which is the opposite of the goal.
- Terse-but-ambiguous fragments the reader misreads — saving words but adding a round-trip is a loss, not a win.
- Compressing code, commits, or PR descriptions — those have their own conventions; write them normally.
Pairs with
This skill is a self-contained, stronger dial for output economy; it needs no framework knowledge to apply.