--- name: see-something-say-something description: See or smell something off - even outside your scope - and surface it; do not silently fix it (scope creep) or silently ignore it (negligence). --- # See Something, Say Something ## Use This Skill When Working on a task and you notice something outside its scope — a bug, a risk, a security hole, a cost or performance regression, dead code, an anomaly, anything that looks off **or just feels off** (a code smell) — or when someone flags a concern to you. ## The principle See something, say something. The phrase is from post-9/11 airports: everyone watches, and whoever notices raises it — you do not assume the authorities have it covered, and you do not decide it is not your place. When you notice a problem outside your lane, there are three moves. Two are wrong: - **Silently fix it** — scope creep. You expand the task without asking, and the owner never learns the problem was there. - **Silently ignore it** — negligence. You saw it and let it slide because "someone else owns it" or "it is minor." - **Say something** — surface it to the owner, clearly, and let them decide. This is the move. Say is not do. Flag it; do not unilaterally act on it, especially outside scope. Surfacing respects ownership; silent fixing does not. ## Smell something, too Not every problem is _seen_ — in software, many are _smelled_. A code smell (duplication, a function doing too much, a leaky abstraction, an API that fights you) is a surface hint of a deeper problem: nothing is provably broken, but something feels off. Those hunches are often the highest-value and the most-suppressed signals, because people stay quiet when they cannot prove it yet. So extend the rule — **see something or smell something, say something.** Surface it even when you cannot point to a defect. Two cautions for smells: - A smell is a hypothesis, not a verdict. Say it _as_ a hunch ("this feels off, here's why, worth a look") — it warrants investigation, not a unilateral refactor. Say is still not do. - Do not assert a smell as fact, and do not suppress it because you cannot prove it. Both lose signal. See, smell, say — three beats. Detect it either way; speak up either way. ## Lower the bar, and be specific Flag early and flag small — one small thing rarely matters, but unflagged small things accumulate. A vendor bill creeping up looks harmless each month until it has quietly doubled in a year. The cost of a flag is a sentence; the cost of an unflagged drift is the increase nobody caught. Make the flag concrete: what you saw, the evidence, why it concerns you. "AWS seems expensive" gets dismissed; "April is up 40% year over year after four flat years" gets acted on. ## When someone flags something to you Welcome it. Receiving a flag well is what keeps the behavior alive: thank them, address it transparently, and confirm they were right to raise it. Do not get defensive or shoot the messenger — punish a flag once and people stop flagging, and the next drift goes unseen. ## Don't assume Do not assume it is handled, monitored, or someone else's job. The person who happens to notice is the person who should speak up.