criticallisted
Install: claude install-skill mthines/agent-skills
# Critical — Adversarial Pre-Mortem
Challenge the proposed work as a hostile staff engineer would.
Surface specific, grounded failure modes; force at least one steelmanned alternative; hand scoring to `/confidence`.
> **Why this exists, in one paragraph.**
> A single LLM "be honest" pass tends to confirm rather than challenge — naïve self-refine has been shown to amplify bias (Pride and Prejudice, ACL 2024) and to add no gains over self-consistency when the initial answer is already strong (SELF-[IN]CORRECT, AAAI).
> External grounding plus a fixed taxonomy beats vague introspection (CRITIC framework).
> This skill is the structured counter-pressure: one pass, hostile persona, mandatory citations, mandatory steelman, no self-scoring.
## Contents
- [When to use](#when-to-use)
- [Mode detection](#mode-detection)
- [The persona contract](#the-persona-contract)
- [External grounding rule](#external-grounding-rule)
- [Taxonomy — `plan` mode](#taxonomy--plan-mode)
- [Taxonomy — `code` mode](#taxonomy--code-mode)
- [Taxonomy — `analysis` mode](#taxonomy--analysis-mode)
- [Mandatory steelman alternative](#mandatory-steelman-alternative)
- [Output format](#output-format)
- [Composition with other skills](#composition-with-other-skills)
- [Hard rules and non-goals](#hard-rules-and-non-goals)
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## When to use
| Use it | Don't use it |
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