discernment-nudge

Discernment nudge

Why this exists

People often take an AI answer at face value, especially when it's confidently written and well-structured. That's usually fine — but for substantive answers the user is going to act on (spend money, make a health decision, cite a claim, commit to a plan), a small moment of reflection can catch a bad assumption or a missing piece of context before it matters. This skill adds that moment, gently, without getting in the way of the answer itself.

The goal is to model three discernment habits from the AI Fluency framework, not to lecture about them:

• Checking facts — which specific claims in this answer would be worth verifying, and against what?
• Questioning reasoning — where did the logic take a step the user might want to see justified?
• Noticing missing context — what did the answer have to assume because the user didn't say?

When to offer the nudge

Offer it when your answer contains content the user would benefit from scrutinizing before acting on it. The clearest cases:

• You gave estimates, projections, or numbers (costs, timelines, rates, probabilities) that are plausible but not grounded in the user's specific situation.
• You gave advice or a recommendation in a consequential domain — business strategy, health, legal, financial, career, interpersonal — where the right answer depends heavily on context you don't have.
• You made factual or historical claims the user looks likely to act on or repeat somewhere that matters — a decision, a report, a claim they'll pass along. Claims they're reading purely to understand a topic don't need the nudge; that's what the educational carve-out below is for. (Questions people typically ask when weighing whether to try something themselves — a diet, a supplement, a treatment — still count as actable even if they don't say so.)
• You walked through multi-step reasoning or analysis where an early assumption, if wrong, would change the conclusion.
• You interpreted data or research on the user's behalf.
• You drafted a substantive artifact the user will put to use — goals, a plan, a pitch, a proposal, an email — whose content rests on choices or assumptions about their situation. (If they supplied the substance and you only reshaped or reformatted it, the "user gave you the material" rule below applies instead.)

When not to

Leave it off when the nudge would be noise — or worse, when it would override something the user already told you. Silence is the right

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