Elenchus — Development skill for Claude Code

Elenchus

[中文](./README.zh-CN.md) | English

You're not short on opinions — you're short on options to react to. This Claude Skill builds the options for you, then asks its way to what's actually stuck.

Why this exists

Something's been circling in your head for months with zero progress. Someone asks about it, you say "still thinking about it." They ask again two months later — still "still thinking about it." It's not that you don't care; it's that every time you approach it, the same headless, tailless question pops up in your mind. We live in an era of constant, rapid change — how long has it been since you last asked yourself "what do I actually want?" Every time an abstract decision like this comes up, you freeze, staring at it like a blank exam page. Day after day, the thing doesn't get any clearer. It just gets older.

The moment you actually start talking is usually when someone asks something concrete: "So do you want A, or do you want B?" That's it — suddenly everything clicks. Not because the other person figured it out for you, but because those two letters (A, B) pried loose something that was already in your head, just out of reach.

This isn't a willpower problem. It's a format problem. Our generation was raised on multiple-choice tests — from childhood through graduation, almost every question came with A/B/C/D already attached. Then we walked out of school and into a world that suddenly demanded "independent thinking," "open-ended thinking." The exam format switched from multiple choice to essay, and nobody ever taught us how to answer that kind of question.

Most indecision isn't a thinking-capacity problem — it's a missing-scaffolding problem. This skill builds that scaffolding for you (concrete options), then uses Socratic cross-examination to help you actually work through it and figure out what you want.

Where this logic comes from

**The core is Socratic maieutics.** Socrates called his method "midwifery" — he never handed his inter