Problem-Solving Skills
A collection of techniques for breaking through stuck points and finding elegant solutions.
Available Sub-Skills When Stuck (Dispatch)
Location: when-stuck/SKILL.md
Start here when stuck. Matches your stuck-type to the right technique. Quick dispatch table for routing to the appropriate sub-skill.
Collision-Zone Thinking
Location: collision-zone-thinking/SKILL.md
Force unrelated concepts together to discover emergent properties. "What if we treated X like Y?" Revolutionary insights come from deliberate metaphor-mixing.
Inversion Exercise
Location: inversion-exercise/SKILL.md
Flip every assumption and see what still works. "What if the opposite were true?" Exposes hidden constraints and alternative approaches.
Meta-Pattern Recognition
Location: meta-pattern-recognition/SKILL.md
Spot patterns appearing in 3+ domains to find universal principles. Extract abstract forms that apply across domains.
Scale Game
Location: scale-game/SKILL.md
Test at extremes (1000x bigger/smaller) to expose fundamental truths. What breaks? What survives? Extremes reveal what normal scales hide.
Simplification Cascades
Location: simplification-cascades/SKILL.md
Find one insight that eliminates multiple components. "If this is true, we don't need X, Y, or Z." Look for unifying principles.
When to Use How You're Stuck Use This Don't know which technique when-stuck Need breakthrough innovation collision-zone-thinking Forced by assumptions inversion-exercise Same issue in different places meta-pattern-recognition Unsure about production scale scale-game Complexity spiraling simplification-cascades Quick Reference Conventional solutions inadequate? → collision-zone-thinking "This must be done this way"? → inversion-exercise Same pattern 3+ places? → meta-pattern-recognition Will it work at scale? → scale-game Same thing implemented 5+ ways? → simplification-cascades
Core Philosophy
"One powerful abstraction > ten clever hacks"
These techniques help you find the elegant solution that makes complexity unnecessary, rather than managing complexity through brute force.