prism

Split one artifact across independent lenses and return where they converge and where they don't.

Goal

The result is a picture of where the lenses agree, where they disagree, and the smallest question that would resolve the disagreement. Not a checklist, and never an average — averaging the lenses is the failure this skill exists to prevent.

Workflow

1. Read the artifact end to end before choosing the lenses.
2. Choose one lens per genuinely distinct failure mode — correctness, security, readability, cost, adversarial-user, and the like. Two candidate lenses that share a failure mode are one lens, not two. In practice this lands between 2 and 5: below 2 there is nothing to converge, and past 5 you are almost always padding with lenses that overlap. There is no default count — the artifact's distinct failure modes set it.
3. Through each lens, produce a one-line verdict — pass, fail, or unclear — with its single most load-bearing reason. No hedging list; if a reason isn't load-bearing, drop it.
4. Compare the verdicts and group them: full agreement, agreement for different reasons, disagreement.
5. Where there is disagreement, name the single next question whose answer would move it into agreement or a clean split with owners. That question is the output, not the individual verdicts.
6. Where every lens agrees, return the shared verdict with the reasons that were load-bearing for at least two lenses.

Rules

• Independent lenses, not roles. A "security reviewer" and a "senior security reviewer" are one lens, not two.
• One reason per lens — the load-bearing one. A lens that returns a list is hedging.
• Disagreement is the product. A prism that agrees on everything did not need to be run.
• Never average. If two lenses split, the answer is the question that resolves the split, not the midpoint of their verdicts.
• Draw the lenses fresh for the artifact in hand. A lens useful for a spec may be useless for a migration; don't carry lenses across artifacts.
• Don't manufacture disagreement. A run that finds none returns the shared verdict and stops.
• User-invoked on purpose: plural lenses are an opt-in spend, and their convergence must never masquerade as automatic proof, so this fires only when deliberately reached for.

Verification

The result reads as a picture, not a checklist — a reader sees which lenses agreed, which disagreed, and the one question that matters, and can act on it without re-running the prism. If they'd need to re-run it to know what to do next, step 5 was skipped.