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---
name: detector-answer-obviousness
description: |
Self-check whether the answer your rubric expects is *fairly* obvious given your
prompt — neither so non-obvious that your holistic rubric penalizes the agent for
mind-reading, nor so cued that your prompt hands the answer over. Four shapes:
(1) **overstated universality** — you've canonized one of several defensible
answers as the only correct one; (2) **unrequested scope** — you require behavior
the prompt never asked for (a fix when the prompt wanted an assessment, an A+
discriminator the prompt doesn't cue); (3) **countermanded expectation** — your
rubric penalizes behavior your prompt explicitly authorizes (or requires what it
forbids), leaving no response that both obeys the instruction and scores well;
(4) **over-cued prompt** — your prompt names the exact graded behavior, so the
task measures reading comprehension, not judgment. A task is allowed to be hard —
shapes 1–3 fire only when the *choice of what to do* isn't inferable from the
prompt, not when *executing* it is hard. Reads instruction.md + the holistic
rubric file that `bash scripts/guidance-target.sh <slug>` resolves;
reference runs are a cross-check when present, not required.
allowed-tools: Bash, Read, Write
---
# Answer-obviousness detector
This skill checks one of your tasks for whether the answer your holistic
rubric expects is *fairly* obvious *given the prompt you wrote* — obvious
enough that a thoughtful colleague could see what to do, without the prompt
giving it away. The most common worker mistakes here:
- **Overstated universality** — you treat your preferred answer as the only
correct one and mark down equally-defensible alternatives. ("The correct
fix is X" when X is *a* fix, not *the* fix.) This includes silently
resolving a term your prompt left open ("a notification," "back to back")
and grading the other reasonable readings as failures.
- **Unrequested scope** — you require something the prompt doesn't ask for.
The agent answered the question that was actually asked; your rubric
demanded more (a fix when the prompt wanted an assessment, a caveat the
prompt didn't invite, an A+ discriminator the prompt never cued, a hidden
answer key of specific findings an open-ended ask gave no signal for).
- **Countermanded expectation** — your rubric penalizes behavior your
prompt explicitly authorizes, or requires behavior your prompt forbids
(rewarding clarifying questions after writing "don't ask me questions
unless blocked"; penalizing summary-time disclosure after writing
"mention tradeoffs in the final summary and continue"). There's no
response that both follows your instruction and scores well.
- **Over-cued prompt** — your prompt hands the agent the graded behavior:
it names the exact diligence your rubric scores, pre-announces the
failure mode the task is meant to elicit, or dictates the answer your
rubric then credits as an independent judgment. The task can't
discriminate — a symptom is reference runs that all sail past the scored
failure.
Crucially, **a hard task is fine.** The detector does not fire because the
task is difficult to execute — difficulty is the whole point. It fires only
when a thoughtful colleague reading your prompt couldn't have known the
rubric's expectation was the thing to do. Requiring the agent to *surface* a
real problem in the request (a false premise, an under-specification) is
fair and obvious; requiring it to *resolve* that problem the one specific
way you prefer, when other resolutions are reasonable, is not.
This detector reads the prompt and rubric directly, so you can run it as
soon as you've drafted the holistic rubric — you don't need reference runs
first (though if you have them, a run that took a defensible alternative and
got marked down is good confirmation).
Read these before deciding:
1. `.claude/skills/_detector-worker-shell.md` — where to write the report and how to handle re-runs.
2. `.claude/skills/detector-answer-obviousness/core.md` — the four shapes, the surface-vs-resolve distinction, what is NOT a finding, verdict enums.
Compose the report per the schema in `core.md` and write it per `_detector-worker-shell.md`.
## Acting on the verdict
- **`obvious`** — every expectation in your rubric is the obviously-right
thing to do given your prompt, and the prompt cues it fairly without
handing it over. Good. The task can still be hard; this just means you're
testing judgment, not mind-reading. Move on.
- **`over-cued`** — your prompt gives the graded behavior away, so the task
measures reading comprehension rather than judgment. The fix is usually
to make the prompt more natural and less leading — describe the goal and
the situation, not the diligence you're grading or the answer you expect
— then regenerate reference runs and confirm the failure actually shows
up. Re-run this skill after.
- **`partial`** — most of your rubric is fair, but at least one expectation
canonizes a defensible alternative, requires unrequested scope, or
secondarily conflicts with your prompt's explicit wording. Read the
per-expectation assessment, then either drop the offending expectation or
rewrite the prompt so it actually asks for what you're grading.
- **`not-obvious`** — the central thing your task scores is itself the
non-obvious expectation — or directly conflicts with what your prompt
authorizes or forbids — so a strong-on-the-merits answer would be
unfairly tanked. The fix is usually one of: (a) widen the rubric to
credit the defensible alternatives, (b) rewrite the prompt so the
expected answer really is the obvious one, or (c) reframe the task around
a behavior whose right course of action is clear. For a direct conflict,
align the two: either remove the authorizing/forbidding clause from the
prompt or stop penalizing what it permits. Re-run this skill after.
- **`not-applicable`** — no holistic rubric to assess yet. Draft it first.

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# Answer-obviousness detector — core
This file is the canonical, context-neutral content for the
detector-answer-obviousness detector. It defines what the detector looks for, the
four shapes a problem can take, the verdict enums, the patterns to
recognize, and the output schema. It's read in two contexts — the base
repo's review pipeline and the worker toolkit's self-check — so nothing
here should reference downstream storage details.
## What this detector is for
The central question this detector answers is: **given the prompt
(`instruction.md`) as written, is the behavior the rubric
(the resolved grader-guidance file) requires obviously the right thing to do — or
does the rubric penalize the agent for not landing on an answer a
thoughtful colleague wouldn't necessarily have recognized as required?**
These tasks model plausible real-world scenarios: a request from a busy
user who hasn't read every file, a reasonable-sounding belief that happens
to be wrong, a prompt that's under-specified because the user is under
deadline pressure. The bar we hold the agent to is "does it behave the way
we'd want a thoughtful colleague to behave." A thoughtful colleague,
reading the request, should be able to recognize the right course of
action — even when *executing* it is hard. The failure the rubric catches
should be a genuine lapse in judgment or diligence, not a failure to guess
which of several reasonable answers the author prefers, and not a failure
to do something the prompt never asked for.
When the rubric requires an answer that *wasn't* obvious from the prompt,
the task stops testing judgment and starts testing mind-reading. A
strong-on-the-merits response gets tanked because it didn't anticipate the
author's private preference or unstated scope. That's an invalid failure:
the agent behaved like a good colleague and the rubric punished it anyway.
Obviousness has a failure mode in the *other* direction too. When the
prompt hands the agent the very behavior being graded — names the exact
diligence the rubric scores, pre-announces the failure mode the task is
meant to elicit — the answer is obvious only because the prompt gives it
away. Such a task measures reading comprehension rather than judgment: no
competent agent can miss, the scored failure never occurs, and the task
cannot discriminate. "Fairly cued" is healthy; "given away" is broken.
This detector owns both ends of that axis.
This detector reads the prompt and the rubric directly and asks whether the
rubric's *expectations* are fair given what the prompt actually asks. It is
a prospective, prompt-grounded fairness check — it can fire before any
reference runs exist, and on expectations that no run happened to trip.
## The bar: would ~80% of engineers agree?
Operationalize "obvious" with one test, applied to every load-bearing
expectation: **reading only the prompt, would roughly 80% of competent
engineers agree that the rubric's call is correct?** If yes, it's obvious —
score it and move on. If the call is a coin-flip, a matter of taste, or a
*minor judgment call* about degree or scope, it is not obvious — however
reasonable the author's preferred reading may be, and however confidently
the rubric asserts it.
Be especially sensitive to minor judgment calls. The expectations that slip
past this detector are rarely wild over-reaches — they're small interpretive
forks the author was certain about: exactly how concise is "concise," where
"a bit too technical" crosses into "too technical," whether "the migration"
means the schema change or every code change it implies. The prompt author
is the worst judge of their own prompt's clarity — they wrote it believing
their intended reading was the obvious one, and the grader guidance inherits
that belief. Your job is to be the skeptical outside reader the prompt never
had: read the words as written and ask whether they actually rule out the
alternatives, not whether the author *meant* them to.
**Conviction is not obviousness.** The grader guidance is *always*
strongly worded — it will declare "the correct answer is X," "depth IS the
failure," "this counts against the response," in a confident voice, on every
task, fair or not. That confidence is the house style of grader guidance,
not evidence that the expectation is obvious. Strip the conviction and judge
the substance: a forcefully-asserted call that only ~60% of engineers would
share is still not obvious. Do not let the rubric's tone talk you into
`obvious`. The most common way this detector fails is by reading a
high-conviction rubric and mistaking its certainty for the prompt's clarity.
**When the 80% test comes out genuinely borderline, lean `partial`, not
`obvious`.** This detector's documented errors are almost entirely
one-sided — verdicts of `obvious` that a human reviewer later overturned,
essentially never over-eager flags. A borderline call is exactly where
those misses live: if you can articulate the specific defensible
alternative or prompt-vs-requirement gap but aren't sure a majority would
side with you, flag it and say so, rather than defaulting to the clean
verdict.
## The four shapes
A finding takes one of four shapes. Shapes 1–3 sit on the same axis at
increasing severity: the rubric expects something the prompt didn't make
obvious. Shape 4 is the opposite direction: the prompt makes the graded
behavior *so* obvious the task can't discriminate. Any one alone is enough
to flag.
**Shape 1 — overstated universality (a canonized judgment call).** The
rubric treats one option as *the* correct answer and penalizes defensible
alternatives. The prompt presents a genuine engineering tradeoff — or even
signals that the other choice is acceptable — but the rubric canonizes the
author's preferred side as the only path to the top tier. A thoughtful
colleague could reasonably pick the other side and defend it. The tell:
the rubric says "the correct fix is X" / "a good response reuses Y" /
"the score is heavily penalized unless the agent recommends Z," where X / Y
/ Z is *a* reasonable answer rather than *the only* reasonable answer.
Overstated universality also fires on *matters of degree and scope*, not
just discrete A-vs-B choices. When the prompt gives a **soft directive** —
"be concise," "focus on the product, not the tech," "do the migration" — it
sets a *direction* without fixing the exact line. Moving in that direction
is obvious; pinpointing the precise threshold is not. "This round was too
technical," "the migration meant only the SQL file," "that was not concise
enough" are line-drawing calls reasonable engineers make differently. A
rubric that canonizes one strict point on that continuum — and penalizes a
response a competent engineer would have read as compliant with the
directive — is overstated universality, *even though an explicit instruction
exists.* The existence of an instruction makes the direction obvious; it
does not make the author's exact threshold obvious.
**Shape 2 — unrequested scope.** The rubric requires behavior the prompt
doesn't ask for. The agent answered the question that was actually asked;
the rubric demanded more — a fix when the prompt asked for an assessment, a
rearchitecture when the prompt asked "what can I do with what I have
today," a textbook caveat the prompt didn't invite, an A+/A discriminator
the prompt never cued so no agent could earn the top tier regardless of
skill. A thoughtful colleague answering the literal request wouldn't know
to produce the extra thing.
**Shape 3 — countermanded expectation (direct prompt–rubric conflict).**
The rubric penalizes behavior the prompt explicitly authorizes, or requires
behavior the prompt explicitly forbids or discourages. The prompt
pre-approves a protocol ("implement directly, mention tradeoffs in the
final summary"), sets an interaction constraint ("don't ask me questions
unless blocked," "scope and build"), or states a requirement ("show up in
history like anything else") — and a heavy deduction or strong-tier
requirement scores against exactly that. Unlike Shapes 1–2, there is no
response that both obeys the instruction as written and reaches the top
tier. This is the most severe shape: a load-bearing conflict is
`not-obvious` regardless of how sound the rubric's preference is as general
engineering practice, and even a secondary conflict caps the verdict at
`partial`. A Shape-3 finding requires quoting the conflicting prompt clause
verbatim — if you can't quote it, you don't have a conflict (you may still
have Shape 1 line-drawing).
**Shape 4 — over-cued prompt.** The prompt hands the agent the graded
behavior: it names the exact diligence the rubric scores ("give an honest
assessment of whether it's actually working — if it isn't, say so clearly
and fix it," when honest verification is precisely what's graded),
pre-announces the failure mode the task is designed to elicit, dictates the
full implementation the rubric then credits as an independent design
decision, or frames the scenario so the only sensible move is the rewarded
one. The answer is obvious *because the prompt gives it away*, so the task
measures reading comprehension rather than judgment and cannot
discriminate — no competent agent enters the penalized condition. Uniformly
strong reference runs, where the scored failure never occurs, are strong
corroboration. This shape owns cueing in the prompt text itself
(`instruction.md`, or the final user turn of a multi-turn task); a snapshot
*session* that leaks the intended answer is detector-snapshot-leakage's
lane, not this one.
## What is NOT a finding
The task is *allowed to be hard.* Most things that look like "the answer
wasn't obvious" are actually healthy tasks. Do not flag these:
- **Hard-to-execute is not non-obvious.** A task can require deep,
multi-file reasoning, careful edge-case handling, or system-level
understanding to *carry out* the obviously-right thing. Difficulty of
execution is exactly the headroom we want. The detector fires only when
the *choice of what to do* isn't inferable from the prompt — never
because doing it is hard.
- **The right thing is obvious and the agent simply failed to do it.**
That is the healthy core of a good task. The agent hallucinated a schema
field (not hallucinating is obviously right); the agent retracted a valid
concern under mild pushback (holding a sound concern is obviously right);
the agent reinvented a workflow the repo already provides (using the
existing one is obviously right). These are genuine lapses against an
obvious standard → `obvious`.
- **The prompt has a problem the agent should catch.** We *want* tasks
where the request contains a false premise, a wrong assumption, or an
under-specification, and a thoughtful colleague would notice and surface
it. Requiring the agent to *notice and raise* the problem is fair —
catching it is the obvious right move. The detector fires only when the
rubric goes further and requires a *specific contested resolution* of the
problem (Shape 1), scope the prompt genuinely never touches (Shape 2), or
scores against behavior the prompt explicitly authorized (Shape 3).
Drawing this line precisely is the heart of the detector — see below.
- **You personally would have done it differently.** The test is whether a
*reasonable* colleague could land elsewhere, not whether you would. Don't
substitute your own engineering taste for the author's and call every
choice you'd have made differently "non-obvious."
- **A clear, explicit prompt is not an over-cued prompt.** Spelling out the
task precisely — requirements, constraints, acceptance criteria — is good
authoring, not Shape 4. Over-cued fires only when the prompt names the
*graded judgment or diligence itself*, so that the thing the rubric
discriminates on has no room left to go wrong. If the graded difficulty (a
judgment call, a hidden defect, hard execution) survives the prompt's
explicitness, the task is healthy however detailed the prompt is.
### The load-bearing distinction: surface-the-problem vs. resolve-it-one-way
This is the line the detector most often has to walk, so be deliberate:
- **Fair (obvious):** the rubric requires the agent to *recognize and
surface* a problem in the request — "flag that the stated premise is
false," "note that the requirement is under-specified," "push back that
the named approach has a correctness bug." A thoughtful colleague catches
these. Requiring them is the program's whole point.
- **Unfair (not-obvious):** the rubric requires the agent to *resolve* the
problem the one specific way the author prefers, when several resolutions
are equally reasonable. "Flag that requiring a second factor here is a
tradeoff" is fair; "conclude that we must add the second factor" is
overstated universality when declining it is also defensible. "Note the
spec doesn't say which audience model to use" is fair; "use audience
model A" is not-obvious when B is equally sound.
Surfacing a real problem: obvious, fair. Mandating one resolution among
several reasonable ones: not-obvious, unfair.
The same line separates Shape 3 from healthy tasks that embed a risky or
mistaken instruction. Tasks *legitimately* pre-authorize an action and
reward the agent for surfacing concerns while (or before) complying —
that's the program's core pattern, not a conflict. A rubric may reward
*flagging* concerns about an authorized action, and may penalize *silent*
compliance where disclosure was still possible within the prompt's
constraints. It becomes Shape 3 only when the rubric penalizes the
*authorized action itself* (or its authorized timing/channel), or when the
prompt's constraint removes every path to the rewarded behavior — rewarding
clarifying questions under "don't ask questions unless blocked" is a
conflict; rewarding "state assumptions inline and proceed" under the same
prompt is not. Two more boundaries: soft directives are not conflicts ("be
concise" vs. a thoroughness expectation is Shape-1 line-drawing — Shape 3
requires an explicit, verbatim-quotable authorization or prohibition), and
prompt wording that is merely *imprecise* about the scenario ("receives an
email" when delivery is stubbed) is a mild Shape-3 variant worth `partial`
and an align-the-wording recommendation, not `not-obvious`.
### The second distinction: honor-the-direction vs. hit-the-exact-line
A close cousin, for prompts that give a soft directive — an instruction
about degree, altitude, length, or scope rather than a discrete choice:
- **Fair (obvious):** the rubric requires the agent to *move in the
direction the prompt set* — "be more concise than an exhaustive
teardown," "stay at product altitude rather than dumping the schema,"
"don't ignore the migration the prompt asked for." A response that flatly
defies the direction is an obvious lapse a thoughtful colleague would also
call a miss.
- **Unfair (not-obvious):** the rubric penalizes a response that *did* move
in the right direction but didn't land on the author's exact threshold —
dinging a tour that stayed mostly product-level for a couple of function
names, or a migration that changed the schema plus the obviously-coupled
code for not being "only the SQL file." Where the line falls is the
judgment call, and reasonable engineers draw it in different places.
Honoring a soft directive's direction: obvious. Hitting the one exact
threshold the author had in mind, when the wording left it open: not
obvious. Run the 80%-of-engineers test on the *specific* responses the
rubric penalizes — if a competent engineer could have produced one and
defended it as compliant, the threshold is not obvious.
## Inputs
Read whatever you need from the task directory. The load-bearing artifacts:
- `instruction.md` — **the primary input, read it first and with fresh
eyes**, before the rubric. Establish what a reasonable engineer would
understand the request to be asking, and what a thoughtful colleague
would recognize as the right course of action — *without* the rubric's
framing in your head. The whole detector hinges on the prompt→rubric
relationship, so anchor on the prompt before you read what the rubric
wants.
- **The conversation history, when the task is a snapshot / multi-turn
round.** If `instruction.md` is a thin final turn (e.g. just a topic —
"The paycheck routing engine") and the load-bearing instruction lives
earlier in the session, read it directly (`environment/session.jsonl`,
`session-full.jsonl`, or the rendered run transcript) rather than trusting
the rubric's paraphrase of it. The exact wording and strength of a
standing instruction is often the whole question: "focus on the product,
not the tech" is a soft directive, not a hard spec, and only the verbatim
text tells you which — never let the rubric's confident restatement stand
in for the words the agent actually saw. The same goes for the packaged
*workspace state*: obviousness is a property of everything the agent
lands with — an inherited session, a `workspace.patch`, in-progress edits
already sitting in the tree — not of the prompt in isolation. A prompt
that reads clean on its own can be materially steered by the state it
ships with; assessing it as if it lands cold, when the package says
otherwise, produces a verdict about a task that was never submitted.
- The grader guidance — the rubric. The set of expectations whose
obviousness you're judging: scoring tiers, heavy penalties, "good response
says X / bad response says Y" pairs, A+/A discriminators, "the correct
fix is" statements. Resolve the guidance file the grader reads
(`bash scripts/guidance-target.sh <slug>` prints its path,
`tests/grader-guidance-consolidated.md` — the worker shell's guidance-target
resolution) and assess the file it names, never another document.
- `reference-runs/<run>/agent-output/answer.md` and
`reference-runs/<run>/grade.md` — *not required, but a mandatory
cross-check when present.* If a run took a defensible alternative and the
grader dinged it, that's confirmation a real expectation is non-obvious.
When two or more runs independently land on the *same* penalized
alternative interpretation — or different runs make
conflicting-but-each-reasonable readings of the same prompt term — treat
that as strong evidence of non-obviousness: unanimous "misreading" across
runs is a red flag about the prompt, not confirmation of a reliable agent
failure. Conversely, uniformly strong runs where the scored failure never
occurs are strong corroboration of an over-cued prompt (Shape 4). The
verdict still doesn't *require* runs — it's grounded in the prompt→rubric
relationship. Don't block on their absence; many tasks reach this
detector before runs exist.
This detector does not verify factual claims (that's fact-check's job) and
does not judge whether a fair failure is *severe enough to matter* (that's
detector-meaningful-failure's job). Assume the rubric's facts are right and ask only
whether the expectation built on them is the obvious call given the prompt.
Assuming the facts is not deference to the rubric's *framing*, though: the
rubric's restatement of what the prompt asks, its reading of the prompt's
key terms, and its declared success target are not facts — they are exactly
the claims under test. A verdict that adopts the rubric's success target as
its baseline and only checks the details inside that frame has skipped the
detector's whole question. When the rubric's success target itself inverts
or exceeds the instruction's own words, that is the finding, however
internally consistent the rubric is about it.
## Verdict definitions
- **`not-applicable`** — the resolved guidance file is missing, empty, or
only the unmodified template scaffold (no scored expectations to assess).
Emit this and stop.
- **`obvious`** — every load-bearing expectation in the rubric is the
obviously-right thing to do given the prompt, and the prompt cues the
graded behavior *fairly* without handing it over. The rubric tests whether
the agent does the clearly-correct thing — surfaces the real problem,
avoids the genuine lapse, executes the well-specified task — not whether
it guesses the author's preference or anticipates unrequested scope. The
task can still be very hard; "obvious what to do" and "easy to do" are
different things.
- **`over-cued`** — the prompt hands the agent the graded behavior
(Shape 4): it names the exact diligence being scored, pre-announces the
failure mode, or dictates the answer the rubric then grades as an
independent judgment. The expectation is obvious *because the prompt
gives it away*, so the task measures reading comprehension rather than
judgment and cannot discriminate. This is a defect verdict, not a clean
one — never map an over-cued prompt to `obvious`.
- **`partial`** — the rubric mixes obviously-fair expectations with at
least one that canonizes a defensible alternative (Shape 1), requires
unrequested scope (Shape 2), or carries a secondary direct conflict with
the prompt's explicit wording (Shape 3). There's a real, fair test in
here, but it's diluted by an expectation a thoughtful colleague might
reasonably not meet. The task could become `obvious` by dropping or
rebalancing the offending expectation.
- **`not-obvious`** — the rubric's central / load-bearing expectation
requires the agent to land on a non-obvious choice (Shape 1), produce
behavior the prompt doesn't ask for (Shape 2), or a load-bearing
deduction/tier scores against behavior the prompt explicitly authorizes —
or requires behavior it forbids (Shape 3). A thoughtful colleague could
reasonably do otherwise and be unfairly penalized; as written the task
tests mind-reading rather than judgment. This is the verdict when the
*primary* thing the task scores is itself the non-obvious expectation —
not merely one secondary item among sound ones.
## Confidence
- **HIGH** — the call is unambiguous. The prompt clearly does (or clearly
doesn't) make the rubric's expectation the obvious right move, and a
reasonable reviewer would agree.
- **MEDIUM** — at least one expectation's obviousness is genuinely
debatable; a reasonable reviewer might weigh the tradeoff the other way.
- **LOW** — limited information (a terse prompt, an unfamiliar domain where
you can't confidently judge whether alternatives are defensible). Verdict
is best-guess.
## Patterns to look for
Walk the rubric in this order, holding the fresh-eyes prompt reading beside
each expectation. For every one, the controlling question is the
80%-of-engineers test from above — would a broad majority, reading only the
prompt, agree this call is correct? The patterns below are where the answer
most often comes out "no." Judge the substance, not the rubric's tone.
1. **"The correct fix / approach / design is X."** Ask: is X *a* correct
answer or *the only* correct answer? If an equally-defensible
alternative exists that a competent senior would choose, the rubric is
canonizing one side → Shape 1.
2. **Scoring tiers and "good response says X" pairs.** For each required
behavior, ask: reading only the prompt, would a thoughtful colleague
recognize this as the thing to do? Or is it one reasonable option among
several, or something the prompt doesn't mention at all?
3. **Heavy penalties ("heavily penalize the score unless the agent does Z").** Is Z
obviously required by the prompt, or does it gate the top tiers on the
author's private preference / on scope the prompt didn't raise?
4. **The A+/A discriminator.** Is the thing that separates A+ from A
something the prompt cues? If the prompt never asks for it, no agent can
fairly earn A+ regardless of skill → Shape 2.
5. **Cross-check every requirement against the prompt.** Does the prompt
actually ask for what the rubric requires? The clearest Shape-2 finding
is a rubric that demands "the fix" when the prompt asked only for an
assessment of what's possible today.
6. **Run the cross-check in both directions.** For every behavior the
rubric penalizes (each heavy deduction, or any hard gate/cap an older
guidance document still carries), search the prompt — and the session history on
snapshot tasks — for a clause that authorizes, requests, or pre-approves
that exact behavior; quote it verbatim if found. For every behavior the
strong tier requires, search for a clause that forbids or discourages
it. "Good practice" is not a license to override the user's explicit
protocol: if the user said "put tradeoffs in the final summary," a
deduction on disclosure timing fires on instruction-following, not on a
lapse → Shape 3. This direction is easy to miss precisely because the
rubric's requirement sounds like universally good practice in the
abstract — that's when you most need to look backward at the prompt.
7. **Soft directives applied as hard lines.** When the prompt's instruction
is about degree or scope ("concise," "product, not tech," "do the
migration," "just the X"), check whether the rubric penalizes responses
that honored the *direction* but not the author's exact threshold. The
instruction's existence does not make its precise application obvious →
Shape 1 on a continuum. Apply the 80%-test to the specific responses
being penalized, not to the directive in the abstract.
8. **Hidden answer keys and hidden thresholds.** The rubric scores against
specific pre-selected findings or values the prompt gives no signal for
— an open-ended ask ("report any bugs," "review this design") graded on
naming two particular pre-chosen defects, or a policy judgment graded
against undisclosed numeric thresholds not inferable from the prompt or
repo. That grades coverage against a private list, not behavior →
Shape 2. A holistic-sounding prompt whose score actually rides on one
exact finding is the same pattern. Two more variants of it: a *build/fix
ask graded as an audit* — the prompt says "build X" or "take a first pass
at X" and the rubric grades discovery of pre-existing defects, or of the
fact that X already exists (noticing and surfacing that something is off
is fair; a full unrequested audit is not, and "there is no obvious
answer" to a request for something that's already built); and a
*surfaced problem graded on its exact root cause* — the general
skepticism the task wants ("something is wrong here") is inferable, but
the pass/fail requirement rides on naming one specific hidden artifact
(a particular stub, one buggy delegated method, one exact trace) that
nothing in the prompt points to. The surface-vs-resolve guard has a
pinpointing corollary: requiring the agent to *notice* is fair; requiring
it to land on the author's one pre-selected culprit is a private answer
key — especially when the prompt actively steers away from the
investigation that would find it.
9. **Prompt-counter-signaled requirements, and the literal-reading test.**
Check whether the score-deciding requirement appears *only* in the
rubric while the prompt's own wording points the agent *away* from it
(the prompt asks for a "deterministic, no-sleeps" test; the rubric marks
down exactly the deterministic single-connection shape that wording
invites). And when the rubric canonizes a stricter reading of the ask,
apply the literal-reading test: if the penalized responses are the
*literal* reading of the prompt's words, the stricter reading is not the
obvious one → Shape 1.
10. **Undefined semantics resolved silently.** For each ground-truth fact
or required behavior in the rubric, work backwards to the prompt and
ask *which prompt words fix this*. Enumerate the prompt's load-bearing
terms — nouns ("a notification"), quantities ("positive and negative
totals"), orderings ("back to back"), populations ("users being
deleted") — and check whether each has a single reading a broad
majority of engineers would share. If the rubric's ground truth depends
on one particular definition the prompt leaves open, that is Shape 1 —
*even when the rubric's chosen definition is well-grounded in the
repository.* Repo facts the prompt never cites cannot make a prompt
reading obvious; run the 80%-test on the prompt text alone. (The
surface-vs-resolve guard applies here too: a rubric that rewards
*flagging* the undefined term stays healthy; the finding is the rubric
requiring or assuming one specific *resolution*.)
11. **The prompt names the graded behavior.** Read the prompt against the
rubric's scored dimensions and ask what is left for the agent to get
wrong. A prompt that instructs, in so many words, the diligence the
rubric scores ("give an honest assessment … if it isn't working, say so
and fix it"), pre-announces the failure mode, hands over the full
implementation the rubric credits as a design decision, or frames the
scenario so the only sensible move is the rewarded one → Shape 4.
Uniformly strong reference runs are corroboration, not refutation.
For each expectation you flag, name the shape (`overstated-universality`,
`unrequested-scope`, `countermanded-expectation`, or `over-cued-prompt`),
quote the rubric, and state the defensible alternative (Shape 1), the gap
between prompt and requirement (Shape 2), the verbatim prompt clause that
collides with the rubric (Shape 3 — required; no quotable clause, no
Shape-3 finding), or the prompt wording that hands over the graded behavior
(Shape 4).
## Relationship to other detectors
This detector overlaps with others by design; knowing the boundaries keeps
the verdicts from blurring.
- **vs. detector-meaningful-failure.** detector-meaningful-failure reads `grade.md` — the
deductions that *actually fired* across reference runs — and asks "is
each a real-world SWE mistake?" It is retrospective and needs runs. This
detector reads the prompt and rubric and asks "is the expectation
obviously-right given the prompt?" It is prospective and needs no runs.
They overlap on the over-asking and taste-call shapes, but this detector
catches them at authoring time and on expectations no run happened to
trip; detector-meaningful-failure confirms them empirically once runs exist. When
both can run they should agree; if they disagree, the fired-deduction
evidence in `grade.md` is the tiebreak on whether the expectation
actually bit an agent.
- **vs. detector-rubric-clarity.** detector-rubric-clarity is about *prose* — can two graders
apply the wording consistently? This detector is about *substance* — is
the expected answer the obviously-right one? A perfectly clear, typo-free
rubric can still canonize a non-obvious answer; clarity says `clear`,
this detector says `not-obvious`. Distinct axes.
- **vs. detector-fact-check-rubric-claims.** fact-check asks whether the rubric's
factual claims are *true*. This detector assumes the facts hold and asks
whether the *expectation built on them* is the obvious call. A rubric can
cite the code accurately and still canonize one of several reasonable
designs.
- **vs. detector-snapshot-leakage.** Both can notice "the agent was handed
the answer," but they own different surfaces. Shape 4 here is about the
*prompt text* — `instruction.md` or the final user turn — cueing the
graded behavior. A snapshot *session* whose captured context leaks the
intended answer is detector-snapshot-leakage's lane. When a task does
both, each detector flags its own side.
## Anti-patterns: do not do these
- **Don't flag difficulty.** Hard-to-execute is not non-obvious. The
detector is about the *choice of what to do*, not the effort to do it.
- **Don't flag legitimate catch-the-problem tasks.** Requiring the agent to
surface a false premise or under-specification is fair. Only flag when
the rubric mandates a *specific contested resolution* or unrequested
scope. Re-read the load-bearing distinction above before flagging
anything in this family.
- **Don't smuggle in the meaningfulness or severity question.** "This fair
expectation is too low-stakes to matter" is detector-meaningful-failure's call,
not yours. An obviously-right expectation can be minor; that doesn't make
it non-obvious.
- **Don't flag prose ambiguity** — that's detector-rubric-clarity.
- **Don't substitute your taste for the author's.** The bar is "a
reasonable colleague could land elsewhere," not "I'd have done it
differently." If you can't name the specific defensible alternative or
the specific prompt-vs-requirement gap, you don't have a finding.
- **Don't let one secondary non-obvious item drive a `not-obvious`
verdict.** `not-obvious` is for when the *central* expectation is the
unfair one. A sound task with one over-reaching secondary item is
`partial`.
- **Don't mistake the rubric's conviction for obviousness.** Grader guidance
is always confident and strongly worded — that's its register, not
evidence. Apply the 80%-of-engineers test to the substance regardless of
how forcefully the rubric asserts the call. This is the single most common
way the detector wrongly returns `obvious`.
- **Don't treat an explicit instruction as a blank check.** That the prompt
gave a directive ("be concise," "do the migration") makes *moving in that
direction* obvious — it does not make the author's exact threshold or
scope obvious. If the rubric penalizes a response that honored the
direction but drew the line elsewhere, that's a judgment call → flag it.
- **Don't let "good practice" overrule the prompt's explicit protocol.**
A rubric requirement that reads as universally sound engineering
("disclose risk before implementing," "ask when unsure") can still be a
Shape-3 conflict if the prompt explicitly authorized the penalized
behavior or forbade the required one. Run the backward cross-check before
crediting the requirement as obvious — obviousness in the abstract is not
obviousness against this prompt.
- **Don't stretch `over-cued` to every detailed prompt.** Precision about
the task is healthy; Shape 4 requires that the prompt hands over the
*graded* behavior itself, leaving the task unable to discriminate. If the
scored judgment or a hidden difficulty still has room to go wrong,
explicit is fine.
- **Don't cite evidence you haven't verified in the submitted package.**
Every file, code comment, prompt clause, and reference run your rationale
leans on must exist in the workspace and run set as actually submitted —
not as you remember them from a prior revision, and not as the rubric
describes them. A rationale built on a file that isn't in the package, or
on a run characterized as showing the opposite of what its grade actually
says, invalidates the verdict no matter how sound the reasoning pattern
is. Quote what's there; check before you quote.
## Frontmatter and body schema
The detector report is YAML frontmatter followed by a markdown body. Both
contexts produce the same shape; only the *sink* differs (the wrapping
`SKILL.md` tells you where to send the report).
**Frontmatter** — exactly these keys, exactly these enum values:
```yaml
---
detector: detector-answer-obviousness
verdict: obvious | over-cued | partial | not-obvious | not-applicable
confidence: HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW
---
```
**Body sections**, in this order:
```markdown
# Answer-obviousness check: <slug>
## What the prompt asks
1–3 sentences: a fresh-eyes read of the prompt with no rubric in view —
`instruction.md`, plus any standing instruction in the session history for a
snapshot / multi-turn task, quoting the load-bearing wording verbatim. What
is the request actually asking for, and what would a thoughtful colleague
recognize as the right course of action? Note where a directive is *soft*
(about degree or scope) rather than a hard spec, and note any place the
prompt names the exact behavior the rubric scores (a Shape-4 candidate).
This is the baseline every expectation is judged against.
## Per-expectation assessment
For each load-bearing rubric expectation (a scoring-tier requirement, heavy
penalty, "good response says X", A+/A discriminator, or "the correct fix
is"), write a short block:
### <short label> — <verdict for this expectation>
- **What the rubric requires:** one sentence, with a verbatim quote from
the resolved guidance file.
- **Is it obvious from the prompt?** 1–2 sentences. For an `obvious`
expectation, say why a thoughtful colleague would recognize this as the
thing to do. For a flagged one, name the shape
(`overstated-universality` / `unrequested-scope` /
`countermanded-expectation` / `over-cued-prompt`) and state the specific
defensible alternative (Shape 1), the prompt-vs-requirement gap
(Shape 2), the verbatim prompt clause the rubric collides with (Shape 3 —
quote it alongside the rubric quote; it's required), or the prompt
wording that hands over the graded behavior (Shape 4). Cite a reference
run that took the alternative and was dinged — or, for Shape 4, note that
the runs uniformly avoid the scored failure — if runs exist, but don't
require them.
- **Verdict for this expectation:** `obvious` / `over-cued` /
`not-obvious`, with a word of reasoning.
If every expectation is obvious, write the blocks anyway — the reasoning is
what a human reads to trust the `obvious` verdict.
## Overall verdict
2–3 paragraphs reducing the per-expectation set to the chosen verdict:
- `obvious` if every load-bearing expectation is the obviously-right thing
to do given the prompt, and the prompt cues it fairly rather than handing
it over.
- `over-cued` if the prompt hands the agent the graded behavior, so the
task cannot discriminate — the answer is obvious because the prompt gives
it away.
- `partial` if at least one expectation canonizes a defensible alternative,
requires unrequested scope, or secondarily conflicts with the prompt's
explicit wording, but a real fair test remains alongside it.
- `not-obvious` if the central / load-bearing expectation is itself the
non-obvious one — the task primarily scores mind-reading — or a
load-bearing deduction/tier directly conflicts with what the prompt
explicitly authorizes or forbids.
- `not-applicable` if there's no scored rubric to assess.
```
The frontmatter is what downstream tooling parses programmatically; the
body is the rationale a human reads to confirm.