Problem Solving

Problem-Solving Skills

A collection of techniques for breaking through stuck points and finding elegant solutions.

Available Sub-Skills

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.

Sequential Thinking

Location: references/sequential-thinking.md

Structured, revisable step-by-step reasoning via the MCP tool mcp__sequential-thinking__sequentialthinking. For multi-stage analysis, design planning, problem decomposition, or tasks with initially unclear scope where thoughts may need revision or branching.

When to Use

| How You're Stuck | Use This | |------------------|----------| | Don't know which technique | Use this table, then load the matching technique below | | 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 | | Multi-step reasoning needing revision/branching | references/sequential-thinking.md | | Still stuck after 2+ techniques | escalate to the advisor agent |

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
Many interconnected steps, unclear scope, may revise? → references/sequential-thinking.md
2+ techniques tried, still no progress?  → escalate to `advisor` agent

Escalation: Advisor

When two or more techniques have been applied with evidence and the problem is still stuck, spawn the advisor agent (strongest model tier) instead of cycling a third technique. Hand it a compact evidence bundle — the question, each technique tried and why it failed, and the relevant file paths — and act on its one-shot Advisor Report. An explicit @advisor mention from the user skips this gate entirely.

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.

Source Notes

Provenance and adaptation details for these techniques are recorded in ABOUT.md (derived from the Microsoft Amplifier project's agent patterns).

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: danielleit241
• Source: danielleit241/forge
• License: ISC

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.