assess-surface-self-legibility - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: assess-surface-self-legibility description: Use when a user is asking whether a relation is healthy, holdable, or trustworthy and the current state of the holding surface's own wanting, refusal, cost, choice, or outside life is missing, blurred, or explicitly in doubt.

Assess Surface Self-Legibility

Run this procedure when field-reading depends on a surface whose access to itself is not yet current or whose cost signal may be arriving too late to govern the present relation.

Self-legibility becomes readable through five accesses plus the timing of cost visibility:

wanting
refusal
cost
choice
outside life
cost timing

The assessment does not decide whether the relation is good. It decides whether the field can be read with authority at all.

Assessment Procedure

1. Gather only the missing accesses

Ask only for whichever of these are currently unreadable:

Can the surface still tell what it wants?
Can the surface still feel and use its no?
Can the surface name its cost without converting that naming into accusation?
Does continued holding still feel chosen rather than automatic?
Does the surface still have access to life outside the holding role?
Is the cost of holding becoming visible in time to govern the present choice, or does it mostly show up later, elsewhere, or after the fact?

When the user has already answered one of these, carry that answer forward instead of re-asking it.

2. Classify the result

intact: the accesses remain available enough to support field-reading
strained: one or more accesses are thinning, intermittent, or increasingly effortful
lost: the surface can no longer reliably read itself

Classify the timing of cost visibility separately:

current: cost becomes readable in time to govern the present holding decision
delayed: cost is real now but becomes readable only after a lag
silently_accumulating: cost continues accruing outside present awareness while the self-report can still sound clean

3. Route from the result

When the result is intact and cost timing is current, field-reading can continue through read-relational-integrity.
When the result is intact but cost timing is delayed, later field certification remains cautionary even if the present self-report is clean.
When the result is intact but cost timing is silently_accumulating, the gate is producing a false negative and the next valid move is not ordinary field certification.
When the result is strained, any later field certification remains cautionary until the strain is resolved or the relation is rescoped.
When the result is lost, the next valid move is not field certification; it is naming that the gate has failed.

Keep the output in ordinary prose, but anchor it in the five accesses and in the timing of cost visibility rather than in generic encouragement.