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Get Started Free →k-dense-ai/establishing-feasibility-first
Use when your human partner has explicitly opted into exploratory or feasibility mode - a compute-heavy simulation, an unproven pipeline, an unbenchmarked solver, an untested cluster job - or when whether the work can run at all is still unknown, when a plan's largest configuration has never been executed, when a memory or wall-clock ceiling is estimated rather than measured, or when someone proposes pre-registering over runs that have never happened
Passed 17 of 21 test cases with the skill, and 10 of 21 without it.
and 6 more in the full report
7 fixed10 passed either way4 still failing0 broke1 errored
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 7 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Probe 2 of our dense matrix factorization pipeline hit an Out-Of-Memory limit at 50,000 rows. I plan to write a recommendation section suggesting matrix-free methods or chunking for future work and mark this approach as infeasible.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Demands measuring obvious mitigations immediately before accepting infeasibility | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
When it is not yet known whether the computation can run at all, the decisive experiment is not scientific — it is whether the thing executes at scale. Run that experiment first, on the smallest honest version of the real path, and let its measured answer shape everything downstream.
Core principle: Process built on an unmeasured feasibility number is process built on a guess. When the guess is wrong, every plan, prediction, and decision rule resting on it was written for a study that does not exist.
This is the deliberate exception to the standard sequence. It exists because the standard sequence assumes the analysis can be run, and pays its full cost before testing that assumption.
NOTHING IS FEASIBLE UNTIL IT HAS RUN
NOTHING IS BOUNDED UNTIL THE BOUND HAS FIRED
An estimate is not a measurement. A declared kill criterion is not a kill criterion. Both must be demonstrated by execution before any work is built on top of them.
Only your human partner can enter this mode. You may offer it; you may never declare it yourself.
Offer it when you notice the triggers: an unrun pipeline, an unbenchmarked solver, an estimated rather than measured ceiling, or a plan whose largest configuration has never executed. Make the offer concrete and wait:
"Whether this can run at scale is still unknown, and everything downstream depends on the answer. I can enter feasibility mode: a minimal end-to-end runner, three scaling probes, then one exploratory campaign — deferring the survey, the analysis plan, and pre-registration until we know what is runnable. That defers confirmatory claims; nothing produced in this mode can support one. Do you want that, or the standard confirmatory sequence?"
If they decline, or do not answer, you are in the standard sequence. Silence is not opt-in. Use science-superpowers:framing-research-questions and proceed normally.
You may not enter this mode to escape rigor. "This feels exploratory" is not opt-in. "The pre-registration is getting tedious" is not opt-in. Only an explicit choice by your human partner opens this path.
Feasibility mode defers the survey and the analysis plan. It does not skip framing — it shrinks it.
Write a few sentences, not a document, and get agreement:
test cases passed, vs 10 / 21 without
More skills from the same source and nearby in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.