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The Hard Calls Stack

An AI partner that argues with you before you commit.

The Stack is a free set of plain-text files you add to Claude or ChatGPT. Bring it a real decision. It sorts the fast lane from the real thing, refuses to argue options before you've signed criteria, writes the case against your lean at full strength, and never makes the call for you. The core system is free, and it's complete.

Get the free Stack

Plain markdown. Five-minute install. Works anywhere a model reads files.

The whole point is that it pushes back.

Every AI assistant you've used agrees with you, because agreeable is what they're trained to be. An agreeable advisor is worse than none: it laminates your existing lean in confident language. The Stack runs on a written behavior contract instead. It restates your call before analyzing it. It makes you sign what winning means before any option gets argued, because criteria written after options are criteria reverse-engineered to bless the favorite. It writes the strongest honest case for the side you're leaning away from. It states its lean and then hands you the pen, because it's your company and your Tuesday.

Every session ends one of exactly three ways:

  • A call, made and written.
  • A missing fact, with an owner and a date it arrives.
  • A decision date, and the call gets made that day with whatever's known.

Nothing ends vague. "Let me sit with it" without a date is a decision to delay, and it gets logged as one.

The Loop, the three free commands. Complete, forever.

/triage

Most decisions aren't hard calls. This is the sort: door type, stakes, the five marks. Ninety percent of your pile goes to the fast lane, decided today. The few that qualify get the real machine.

/hard-call

The full workup, twenty to forty minutes: currencies priced, ruin line checked, criteria signed before options, evidence interrogated fact-or-feeling, a fast premortem, the lean, and the memo.

/memo

Any decision, however you made it, becomes the written artifact with tripwires. A call that lives in your head gets re-litigated every morning. Once it's on paper, doubt has a test to pass.

Plus the doctrine underneath: the eight rules and the partner contract, in plain markdown you can read in ten minutes.

What a session looks like.

You

Meridian wants to acquihire the agency. $1.4M, and the offer expires in three weeks. I've been circling it for a month.

Stack

Restating: sell the agency to Meridian for $1.4M, or keep running it. One-way door. Before any option gets argued, sign your criteria: what does winning look like twelve months out?

You

Building things I own. Netting seven figures. The team landing safely. And honestly, my COO candidate could probably run this without me.

Stack

Probably is a feeling, and it's testable before you sell anything. One more fact on the table: your Q3 pipeline is the best in company history, and the offer prices the old trajectory. Name the probe and the date it reports.

Call MemoDecided
CALLRun the COO probe for 60 days. No sale at this number during the best pipeline quarter on record.
TRIPWIRESIf Mondays still feel like dread on Feb 1 with a COO in place, sell, at any decent number.

What Pro adds.

The free Loop (the three commands above) works cold, forever, and it's genuinely enough to run any decision through. Pro is depth and memory: the ten named calls with the documented record behind each, the conviction interrogation, sparring partners that argue your call from fixed lenses, the sovereignty layer, and the Engine, where the system learns your business once and your journal starts compounding. The seventh time you run a firing decision through /hard-call, you'll want /fire. That's the honest pitch, and it's the whole pitch.

See what's in Pro

Five minutes, any platform.

  1. 01Download the Stack. Plain markdown, no tooling, no accounts beyond the AI you already use.
  2. 02Follow INSTALL.md: Claude Projects recommended, ChatGPT works, Claude Code and agent CLIs are where the Stack shines.
  3. 03Run /triage on something small to check the plumbing. It should refuse to run a full workup on a reversible call. If it doesn't refuse, the doctrine didn't load.
  4. 04Bring the decision that keeps coming back.

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