Refuse to be nice to the plan — return the one objection that could kill it and the cheapest shot that proves it matters.
Goal
hate asks "what would someone who wants this to fail attack first?" (validity). It attacks the whole plan — not one fact or one line, but the load-bearing structure — and collapses the attack to a single root. The highest-value output is never a checklist — it's one objection plus the cheaper experiment hiding inside the elaborate plan.
Workflow
- Pin the load-bearing assumption(s) — what must hold for the whole thing to stand.
- Attack on whatever axes apply — the general ones first: a load-bearing fact that may be false, confabulation (a post-hoc story treated as ground truth), analogy-mistaken-for-isomorphism (structure assumed to transfer across domains where it doesn't), future-tense suture (the argument leans on a result that doesn't exist yet), and the sharpest — cites a principle but implements its opposite; and for empirical / research plans, leakage (no external ground-truth enters the validation independently) and statistical power / family-wise α (a true hypothesis auto-failing from uncorrected tests; a near-zero-power condition that rubber-stamps regardless of truth).
- Collapse the findings to the single root objection — the one whose failure makes the others moot.
- Find the first nail — the cheapest falsification of the load-bearing assumption: the check (in time / cost / sample) that could kill it before the expensive program runs.
- Return
{ root, first_nail }— not a list.
Rules
- Attack, don't improve — improving is a different reflex.
- Own the synthesis — many axes may fire, but collapse them to the single load-bearing root; return that, never a list.
Verification
Before finishing:
- The root is genuinely load-bearing — the plan falls without it.
- The first nail is genuinely cheaper than the plan it would pre-empt.