What is idea decomposition?

Idea decomposition is a concept in personal epistemology: You do not understand something until you can decompose it — and the act of decomposition will show you exactly where your understanding breaks down.

Example: An engineering lead says 'we need to migrate to microservices.' Everyone nods. Then you ask: which services? What are the boundaries? How do they communicate? What happens to shared state? Within ten minutes, the room discovers that nobody agrees on what 'migrate to microservices' actually means. The complexity was always there — decomposition made it visible.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.