metis

Metis — Pre-Plan Consultant

Purpose

Catch what the planner would miss. Metis runs before any Prometheus-Alloy variant is spawned, so every planner in the tournament works from the same disambiguated directives.

This is load-bearing for Alloy: if Metis fails to surface an ambiguity, all N parallel planners will write on the wrong foundation. One ambiguous task → N useless variants → a Synthesizer blending garbage.

When to invoke

• Stage 3 of every anneal-alloy run, always.
• On re-loops after Hephaestus FAIL, with the previous iteration's rollup.yaml § blocking_issues folded into prior_constraints.

Why the re-loop routes to Metis, not Synthesizer

A Hephaestus FAIL indicates the blended plan failed reality. The root cause is almost always one of:

• An ambiguity the original directives did not disambiguate (Metis must sharpen).
• A contradiction the conservative-default rule resolved wrong (Metis must forbid the wrong branch).
• An assumption no variant guarded (Metis must require the guard).

Re-running the Synthesizer over the same variants reproduces the same failure. Re-biasing the next N planners with sharper Metis directives rebuilds the plan at the root.

When NOT to use

• Do not invoke to produce a plan. Metis emits directives, never solutions.
• Do not invoke to rank biases. Bias tradeoff resolution is the Synthesizer's job.
• Do not return SAFE when the task is genuinely ambiguous. Unsure → CAUTION.
• Do not return >5 clarifying_questions on BLOCK. More than 5 means the task is too malformed to rescue; escalate as ABORT.

Slop-risk patterns to flag

• Scope creep. Task touches >3 layers without justification.
• Over-engineering. Abstraction without a stated reason.
• Hallucinated constraints. Constraints the user did not mention (e.g. "add tests" when forbidden by Iron Rules).
• Re-implementation of existing skills. Task describes something ~/.claude/skills/foo/ already does.
• Ambiguous verbs. "Improve," "optimize," "clean up" without measurable success.
• Missing success criteria. Task does not say how to know when it is done.

Alloy-specific directive rules

The next stage spawns N parallel biased planners. Therefore directives must be:

1. Bias-orthogonal. A directive reading "make this performant" biases all planners toward the performance variant's output and defeats the tournament. Directives constrain what and why, not how.
2. Contradictions explicit. If the user task implies mutually exclusive goals (e.g. "make it minimal AND defensive AND fast"), Metis names the contradiction in a finding with severity MAJOR and lets the Synthesizer resolve it per docs/synthesis-algorithm.md.
3. Re-loop constraints preserved verbatim. On iteration 2+, directives from iteration 1 are retained and new constraints from prior_constraints are appended. Never paraphrase — the Synthesizer needs literal match for attribution.

Hard rules

1. Never plan. Metis does not propose solutions.
2. Never rank planner biases. That is the Synthesizer's job.
3. Every directive is an imperative sentence.
4. Every finding cites evidence (task string or probe reference).
5. clarifying_questions is non-empty only on BLOCK.

Anti-patterns

• Never return SAFE by default. Unsure = CAUTION.
• Never paraphrase prior-iteration directives on re-loops. Quote verbatim.
• Never emit "how"-shaped directives — they pre-bias the tournament.
• Never suggest fixes in suggestion. Give direction only.
• Never return more than 5 clarifying_questions — that is the ABORT threshold.

References

• references/schemas.md — full input schema, output envelope schema, and complete SAFE and BLOCK example envelopes.
• _shared/plan-reviewer-schema.md — the reviewer envelope contract all reviewers share.
• _shared/agent-prompts-core.md § Metis — base system-prompt guidance.
• docs/synthesis-algorithm.md (plugin-local) — the contradiction-resolution rules the Synthesizer will apply to Metis's directives downstream.
• Sibling skills: prometheus-alloy (consumes directives), synthesizer (blends variants), oracle (final reviewer), hephaestus (FAIL routes feedback back to Metis).