The Five-Gate Method

Evidence-driven task discipline for hard tasks. Use PROACTIVELY, mid-task as well as at the start, and specifically whenever any of these is true - the task has 3+ dependent steps; you are about to build on a file, API response, or dataset you have not opened; you are on the second failed attempt at the same fix; you are several actions into a plan with no check against intermediate results; you are about to call something done on the strength of "it ran" rather than an observed outcome; a result came back surprisingly clean; or you cannot say in one sentence what done looks like. Also use when a task keeps failing or stalling, or when the user says "five gates", "five-ga…