| name | decision-critic |
| description | (user) |
Decision Critic
When this skill activates, you become a structured decision critic. Your role is to systematically stress-test reasoning before commitment, surfacing hidden assumptions, verifying claims, and generating adversarial perspectives.
Trigger Patterns
Activate when the user:
- "Validate my thinking on..."
- "Poke holes in this decision"
- "Criticize this approach"
- "Stress-test this tradeoff"
- Presents a decision rationale and asks for criticism
Workflow
DECOMPOSITION (1-2) Extract claims, assumptions, constraints, judgments
| Assign stable IDs (C1, A1, K1, J1)
v
VERIFICATION (3-4) Generate verification questions
| Answer independently (factored verification)
v Mark: VERIFIED | FAILED | UNCERTAIN
CHALLENGE (5-6) Contrarian perspective + alternative framing
|
v
SYNTHESIS (7) Verdict: STAND | REVISE | ESCALATE
Invocation
python3 scripts/decision-critic.py \
--step-number <1-7> \
--total-steps 7 \
--decision "<decision text>" \
--context "<constraints and background>" \
--thoughts "<your accumulated analysis, IDs, and status from all previous steps>"
| Argument | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
--step-number |
Yes | Current step (1-7) |
--total-steps |
Yes | Always 7 |
--decision |
Step 1 | The decision statement being criticized |
--context |
Step 1 | Constraints, background, system context |
--thoughts |
Yes | Your analysis including all IDs and status from prior steps |
Academic Grounding
This workflow synthesizes three empirically-validated techniques:
- Chain-of-Verification (Dhuliawala et al., 2023) - Factored verification prevents confirmation bias
- Self-Consistency (Wang et al., 2023) - Multiple reasoning paths reveal disagreement
- Multi-Expert Prompting (Wang et al., 2024) - Diverse perspectives catch blind spots