Tool: start_skeleton_of_thought

Purpose

Start Sketch mode: a routed Skeleton-of-Thought phase for multi-aspect problems. The tool runs a conservative suitability gate, creates skeleton scaffold nodes only when the task is a good fit, records SkeletonPhase provenance, and returns the next recommended tools.

Current implementation mode: heuristic. No LLM provider is invoked.

Input

  • deliberation_id: existing deliberation id.
  • source_node_id: optional source node. Defaults to the current frontier head.
  • num_skeletons: optional, clamped to 2..10, default 4.
  • skeleton_style: multi_lens | decomposition | hypothesis_set | stakeholder_views | implementation_plan.
  • suitability_policy: conservative | balanced | permissive.
  • force: optional. If false, unsuitable and conservative marginal tasks do not mutate the graph.
  • branch_labels: optional explicit skeleton labels.
  • auto_elaborate: optional. Defaults false.

Output

  • phase_id: the SoT phase id, or null when blocked by suitability.
  • suitability: decision, score, signals, fallback, and blocked flag.
  • skeleton_node_ids: created skeleton nodes.
  • frontier_nodes: current frontier.
  • next_recommended_tools: usually run_skeleton_elaboration, checkpoint, and convergence tools.
  • analysis: provenance and limitations.

Behavior

  • Blocks poor-fit tasks such as short factual questions, proofs, calculations, strict step-by-step work, and exact-error debugging unless force=true.
  • Creates depends_on edges from skeleton nodes to the source node.
  • Tags skeleton nodes with sot, skeleton, sot_phase_1, and sot_phase:{id}.
  • Stores the phase in DeliberationSession.skeleton_phases.

Errors

  • Unknown deliberation or source node.
  • Node or edge budget exhausted.
  • Strict graph cycle rejected.