AI-Assisted Discovery Audit Before Workshop Sign-Off
Fluency is not elicitation. Three examinations sit on the discovery pack before anyone treats a tidy document as a closed workshop.
AI-assisted discovery packs often look ready before anyone in the room has taken a position. A process map, a Decisions heading, and a specific SLA can arrive overnight. The question that follows is reasonable and expensive: do we still need the workshop, or can people confirm by email?
Ihor Nesterenko's Critical Thinking Audit for AI-Assisted Discovery treats that moment as an elicitation failure, not a documentation win. Fluency is not elicitation. Professional practice still treats session output as unconfirmed until it is compared with its source and until named people agree the capture is correct enough to use. A generated pack is very good at looking confirmed. Completeness of coverage is not the same job as a named person taking a position.
Critical thinking on the pack, not a second read of the spec
The article gives analysts three examinations to run in the hour before workshop sign-off. They are not spec probes, and they are not a tone reread sold as human-in-the-loop. They sit on the discovery pack itself, before anyone treats a tidy document as a closed elicitation.
Source asks who actually said each load-bearing claim. Mark Decisions items as said, sourced, or filled. Filled is allowed. Treating filled as said is how a 48-hour refund SLA nobody spoke becomes a workshop outcome.
Silence asks what the pack never asked. Models fill underspecified context so the prose stays coherent. A standard returns process has statuses and an SLA. It does not ask damaged versus change-of-mind versus fraud hold.
Commitment asks what signing would lock. Who would have to unwind the number? Which exception becomes an incident because it was never owned? If a Decisions line has no named acceptor, it is furniture.
A worked walkthrough on retail returns-to-refund shows all three in one pack: a filled SLA, a missing exception split, and an auto-refund line that would have committed Finance past a fraud freeze. The same three questions travel to other domains; the article does not sell a reusable template.
The hour is visible. A locked-in refund rule nobody owned is a quarter of exception handling. If you only have time for one pass, run source first.