Use under time pressure when the situation is still changing and you must act before certainty — cycle Observe→Orient→Decide→Act on ~70% confidence, then re-observe.
productivityby tjboudreaux
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On-demandOn-demand: invoked explicitly — never occupies your agent's context until called.
Core rule: For reversible moves under time pressure, act on ~70% confidence, then immediately re-observe. Cycle faster than the situation compounds; a late perfect plan loses to a fast loop.
When to Use
Incident response, outage, or ongoing degradation where state is still moving.
Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, live traffic shift).
Any time-bounded decision where waiting for full certainty costs more than a reversible action.
When NOT to Use
The situation is static and you have time — deliberate analysis or a hypothesis differential wins.
The next action is irreversible or high blast-radius — raise the evidence bar; 70% is not enough.
You can cheaply localize the cause (read the failing diff, log, or metric) — test that hypothesis directly instead of looping in the dark.
There is no time pressure and no changing environment — OODA adds churn without value.
Procedure
Observe (time-boxed): gather the cheapest high-signal state now — metrics, logs, alerts, recent deploys/config, and feedback from the last action. Cap the window; do not collect forever.
Orient: match observations to a pattern and form ≥2 candidate explanations. Update or discard the mental model when data contradicts it; refuse single-hypothesis lock.
Decide: pick one reversible action that tests the leading hypothesis. State confidence (~70% threshold for reversible moves), the predicted effect, the observation you will check next, and a time box for that check.
Act: execute once, decisively, with a known rollback or degrade path.
Re-observe immediately: compare outcome to prediction within the time box; feed the result into the next Observe. Loop until stable or until the next move is no longer reversible enough for this skill.
Stop condition: exit the loop when the system is stable, the remaining work is static analysis, or the next step requires irreversible commitment — then switch method.
Output
A cycle record (repeat per loop):
Observed — current signals and what changed since last cycle.
Orientation — ≥2 hypotheses; which one leads and why.
Decision — action, confidence, predicted effect, next observation, time box.
Act + result — what ran and what the immediate re-observe showed.
Loop status — continue / stable / escalate out of OODA.
Verification
Falsify/stop: if you cannot name a reversible next action and a near-term observation that would refute it, stop looping and gather more evidence or escalate. If re-observe never happens after act, the loop is broken — fix that before another action.
Over-application guard: do not OODA static design work, irreversible launches, or cases where a single cheap localization check ends the uncertainty. Do not wait for 100% confidence on reversible mitigations under active incident pressure.
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Related skills
Other measured skills in the registry, with their headline benchmark lift.