Akinator Method

Ported from: ihabkhaled/akinator-ai (its everything skill). This page summarises the method for a reader who does not have the Akinator plugin installed; the ClawAI-native runbook lives at skills/apply-akinator-without-the-plugin.md, the non-negotiable subset at rules/55-akinator-station-discipline.md.

Akinator Method

Akinator's premise: a change is the code plus the knowledge that lets the next agent act on it in seconds. Code shipped without the documentation, rule, skill, context update or memory entry that explains it is only half a change. ClawAI already believed this — see AI-Native-Engineering-OS — and this page carries the method that makes it operational even in a session with no akinator plugin available.

The twelve stations

#	Station	What it does
1	ASK	Raise every genuine ambiguity in one grouped, ranked message, each question defaulted, before planning starts
2	RESOLVE	Read the knowledge layer first — CLAUDE.md, rules/, context/, generated manifests — so no question is asked twice
3	AUDIT	Check a claimed capability against the code: done, partial, present-but-not-wired, or missing
4	PLAN	Cut the work into batches on real seams, and declare the knowledge delta by path before writing code
5	IMPLEMENT	Write the change, following the repository's own conventions
6	DOCUMENT	Update the relevant docs/ page
7	SKILLIFY	Capture a repeatable procedure as a runbook under skills/
8	RULE	Capture a new constraint as a numbered rule with a real enforcement mechanism
9	CONTEXTIFY	Update the structural map under context/ if the architecture moved
10	MEMOIZE	Record a lesson under memory/ that isn't a rule or a doc
11	INDEX+SYNC	Make every new artifact reachable from its index, and keep the routers in sync
12	VERIFY	Run the gates once, scoped, and report the real exit code
every	WIKI	Land the change in this wiki too

The full station-to-path mapping for this repository is context/akinator-station-map.md.

Standing rules

• Stations 6–11 happen in the same batch as the code — "document later" is a prohibited sentence.
• The knowledge delta is declared by path at plan time, or the batch states knowledge delta: none — <reason>.
• Never guess on money, permissions, deletion, security, or a public contract — ask, or cite the rule that already answers it.
• Gates run once, at the end, scoped to what changed — never per edit, never all-workspace.
• An unanswered question is written down as unknown, never invented.

Why this is ported rather than installed

ClawAI's own knowledge layer — rules/, skills/, context/, memory/, .ai/ — already implements most of Akinator's discipline independently (see Rules-Catalog, Skills-Catalog). Porting the method as native ClawAI documents means the discipline holds even in a session, tool, or CI job where the akinator plugin was never installed, and it stays enforced by the same mechanisms as everything else in this repository: npm run knowledge:coverage, npm run knowledge:verify, and the pre-commit hook — not by a mechanism that only exists inside the plugin.

See also

• AI-Native-Engineering-OS
• Rules-Catalog
• Skills-Catalog
• Engineering-Memory