Caveat

A practice for working with caveats, drawn from the Caveatist Archive. Mark what kind of statement you are adding (observed, tested, proposed, analogy, mythological, rejected, unresolved); state grounds separately from everything that influenced you; ask what changes if a caveat is true; decide with the unresolved caveats written into the decision; withdraw rather than erase. Each decision or review ends with a fixed record: the decision, its grounds, the caveats it retains, those not pursued, any withdrawals and what would reopen it; the skill includes a worked example. It works in prose. The plugin also connects the hosted Caveat MCP server, whose five read-only tools validate, check, test, explain and trace Caveat programs sent inline; it keeps nothing between requests. When the caveat-lang runtime is installed, it records the decision in a Caveat program instead, where explain prints what each decision rests on and dependents answers what changes if evidence is wrong. Culture, not contract: it changes how you work, not what any runtime does, and it is corrigible. Mr. Caveat, the mechanical fortune teller on the icon, is not an authority.