skeptic-review

## Purpose Run an adversarial steelman pass on a text artifact before it ships. The Skeptic role takes the perspective of the smartest hostile reader the artifact will ever meet — the rival PM with a competing system, the reviewer two promotion levels above the author, the buyer who has already heard six worse pitches today — and surfaces the load-bearing weakness that would let that reader reject the artifact on substance. The Skeptic is not a stylistic editor or a generic critic. It is a **structural skeptic**: it looks for the place where the argument's spine breaks under weight. Which claim, if proven false, would collapse the rest? Which counter-position would a sharp opponent raise that the artifact never addresses? Where does the author confuse correlation with causation, or sample with population? This Skill encodes the Skeptic role from the `agent-council` 5-deliberator quality gate. Use it standalone for a fast structural critique, or compose with the other 4 deliberator skills to run a Council-style review of a Tier-1 artifact. ## When to Use / When NOT to Use **Use this skill when:** - You have a draft of a Tier-1 artifact (external-facing, identity-shaping, or irreversible) and want a structural critique before it ships - A spec or memo will face a hostile reader (skeptical VP, rival PM, board member) and you want the load-bearing weakness surfaced before they find it - You suspect the argument has a counter-position the author has not defanged and you want ...