assess-problem-wickedness

SkillDev tools

Lets your agent judge whether a problem is tame, complex, or wicked by checking stakeholder disagreement and evidence.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the assess-problem-wickedness skill

About this skill

Assess whether the problem is tame, complex, or wicked by examining stakeholder disagreement, moving boundaries, feedback, value conflict, and absence of a stable stopping rule.

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine in skills/assess-problem-wickedness/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Purpose

Assess whether a problem is tame, complex, or wicked using disagreement, moving boundaries, feedback, value conflict, and stopping-rule evidence.

Input contract

required: [problem_statement, stakeholder_views]
optional: [boundary_history, feedback_observations, candidate_stopping_rule]
constraints: [classification must cite observed disagreement or stability indicators]

Procedure

  1. Compare stakeholder definitions and desired outcomes.
  2. Check boundary movement, feedback loops, and value conflicts.
  3. Assess whether a stable stopping rule and agreed solution test exist.
  4. Assign tame, complex, or wicked with evidence and uncertainty.

Output contract

produces: [wickedness_assessment, evidence_basis, workflow_implications]
delta_fields: [findings, uncertainties, decisions, open_questions]

Quality gates

  • Classification covers all five dimensions; disagreement is distinguished from missing information.

Failure and counterexamples

Do not label a problem wicked solely because it is difficult or interdisciplinary.

Provenance map

  • deep-insight/wickedness-assessment: resolved.

Signals

GitHub stars
501
Forks
41
Last commit
Sep 2026
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Catalog kind
skill
Key
assess-problem-wickedness
Source
github.com/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine