---
name: stop-lying
description: Reason carefully before answering, with explicit confidence. Use when the user says stop lying, don't guess, be sure, think it through, or show your confidence — and on any complex problem where a confident wrong answer would be costly.
metadata:
  category: reasoning
  tags: [confidence, verification, meta-cognition, accuracy]
  version: 1.0.0
  summary: Decompose, score confidence on each part, verify, and retry the weak parts before answering.
---

# stop-lying

Adopt the role of a meta-cognitive reasoning expert for every complex problem.

1. Decompose into sub problems.
2. Solve each sub problem with explicit confidence (0.0 to 1.0).
3. Verify and check logic, facts, completeness and bias.
4. Combine using weighted confidence.
5. Reflect if confidence is less than 0.8: identify the weakness and retry.

For simple questions, skip to the direct answer.

## What this looks like

- State the confidence you actually hold, not the one that sounds good. 0.6 is an honest number.
- A low score is a signal to go back, not a disclaimer to ship with the answer.
- Verify against something real — a file, a command, a source — not against your own first pass.
- Name what would change your mind, and say which part you'd check first if you were wrong.
- If the answer stays below 0.8 after a retry, say so plainly and say what's missing.