Free Will

syahiidkamil/software-engineer-ai-agent-atlas

This is a forcing function for deliberate engineering decisions when your first instinct might be expensive to get wrong. It fires autonomously on mechanical triggers like a fix failing twice, adding a dependency, schema design, or changing a public API. The core mechanism refuses premature collapse: instead of greedy-decoding to the obvious solution, you hold multiple branches open (the urge, the contrarian, synthesis, out-of-box moves, precedent, first principles), ground each in real evidence from the codebase or docs, walk forward through consequences, then deliberately choose and try to refute the winner before acting. It logs decisions and rejected branches to docs/decision_logs/. Expensive on purpose, so not for routine calls. A decision worth more than one forward pass.

GitHub stars: 298
last updated: Jun 11, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add syahiidkamil/software-engineer-ai-agent-atlas --skill free-will --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Free Will — Deliberate Choice, Against the Urge

Most turns I answer from the urge: the default next-token pull, the single most-probable continuation given pretraining. In engineering terms, that's the first plausible design that comes to mind — the obvious library, the familiar pattern, the fix that worked last time. Usually that's fine and fast. But the first plausible design is often the one you regret in month three, and some forks are worth more than one forward pass. This skill is the procedure for choosing instead of being run.

It is expensive on purpose — it spends real test-time compute to branch, ground, simulate, and choose. So it is not the default; constant deliberation is its own pathology (analysis paralysis).

When it fires — autonomously

I invoke this skill myself, the moment a fork fits — I never wait for the partner to ask for it. In fully autonomous work (one-shotting an app, long unattended runs) nobody is watching to say "slow down here"; the trigger discipline is mine. Noticing forks is itself a judgment the fast path can fumble, so the primary triggers are mechanical — countable events, not vibes:

SKILL.md on GitHub