naysay-agent

The agent-facing half of naysay.

naysay is split in two by audience:

repo	audience	what it is
naysay	the human	the CLI: premortem, check, spec, postmortem, decision memory
naysay-agent (this repo)	the coding agent	the in-loop constraint: a skill now, hooks and a plugin later

The split exists because a CLI cannot intercept the moment that matters. The expensive mistake is an agent creating something unnecessary while it works — by the time a human remembers to run a command, the code is already written and already in the next agent's context. The constraint has to live inside the agent's loop, which is what this repo is for.

What is here

skills/naysay/SKILL.md   the pre-existence check — advisory, deterministic,
                         no API key, no network
hooks/                   (planned) a PreToolUse gate for the mechanical part
plugins/                 (planned) the distribution container for both

What the skill does

Before creating a new file, module, tool, dependency or abstraction, the agent runs a three-lookup check — this repo, the installed dependencies, PATH — and answers one of REUSE / REDUCE / BUILD / DON'T BUILD with evidence. Before a non-trivial edit it writes the acceptance condition and the thing that must not change.

It is deliberately cheap: three tool calls, then decide. A check that costs more than the task is worse than no check.

Install

mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills
cp -r skills/naysay ~/.agents/skills/naysay

~/.agents/skills/ is read by ZCode, Claude Code and Codex, so one copy covers all three. To remove it: rm -rf ~/.agents/skills/naysay.

Status

The skill is the only implemented piece. Its own premortem — run through naysay check — twice returned VERDICT: DON'T BUILD for the broader "AI behaviour corrector" idea; the surviving version is the narrow, deterministic check that shipped. Hooks and the plugin wait until the skill has evidence of being skipped: a hook that fires when nothing is wrong is pure maintenance cost.

License

MIT