skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md
Adversarial pre-mortem: imagine the plan failed, work backwards to surface risky assumptions + irreversible bets, then harden them. Proactively offer it (after the current request; confirm first) before a hard-to-reverse or one-way-door call (API, schema, framework, a hire), an all-upside plan, or unvalidated assumptions. Also on request.
npx skillsauth add bjornmelin/dev-skills pre-mortemInstall this skill globally with one command. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
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Stress-test this plan before reality does. Not to kill it, but to make it survive contact with reality.
When you surface this proactively (rather than because the user asked): only do so when a decision is genuinely hard to reverse (a public API, schema migration, framework or architecture choice, a hire) or a plan is drawing only positive feedback, and raise it after you finish the user's current request, as a one-line offer. Produce the full Challenge Report only once they confirm. When the user invokes it directly, skip the offer and run it.
The technique: imagine it is 12 months from now and this plan failed. Work backwards, find why, then harden the plan against it.
Run the five-step framework and produce the Challenge Report described in references/pre-mortem-framework.md: extract the assumptions the plan needs to be true, rate each on confidence and impact-if-wrong, map the vulnerabilities (low confidence + high impact), trace the dependency chain, and test reversibility. Close with kill switches and hardening actions.
Find facts yourself rather than asking: explore the codebase, use context7, gh, opensrc, or web search for what you can look up, and for anything that needs real investigation dispatch the /research skill (which can draw on deep-researcher for deep cited research).
Do not treat the output as a verdict; it is a vulnerability map. Surface the risky bets so they can be validated, hedged, or accepted knowingly. Unknown risks are dangerous; known risks are manageable.
development
Pre-PR multi-model review, parallel opus and codex exec adversarial lanes, then adversarial verification of merged findings. Read-only. Use before shipping nontrivial diffs.
tools
Independent gpt-5.6 diff review via the Codex CLI, normal or steerable adversarial with JSON findings. Use before shipping nontrivial changes.
development
Delegate implementation, investigation, or bulk work to gpt-5.6 codex via pinned codex exec. Use for clear-spec builds, migrations, debugging, or any task MODELS.md routes to codex.
documentation
Batch-grill a plan or design round by round: whole settled frontier per round, recommended answers + close-call scores, ADRs + a glossary via domain-modeling, /pre-mortem handoff on irreversible calls.