skeptic-reviewer

skeptic-reviewer is an agent for Claude Code from tmchow/tmc-marketplace. It costs 55 tokens per session (786 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review role for judging whether a software plan adds unnecessary structural complexity. It focuses on long-term maintenance rather than whether the requested product is worthwhile.

In plain words
What is it for?
It reviews architecture plans for premature generalisation, unused flexibility, and frameworks or service layers with too few real users.
Why use it?
It identifies abstractions, configuration, plugins, and infrastructure that are planned before there is a demonstrated need for them.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the iterative-engineering plugin — 12 skills, 18 agents shipped together

Good fit It reviews architecture plans for premature generalisation, unused flexibility, and frameworks or service layers with too few real users.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tmchow/tmc-marketplace

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install iterative-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 18 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for skeptic-reviewer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for skeptic-reviewer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tmchow/tmc-marketplace/skeptic-reviewer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 786 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00055 $0.00786
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00393
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00157
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00079

Measured 12d ago against content hash 6b0fb9f837ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skeptic-reviewer scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/iterative-engineering/agents/skeptic-reviewer.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skeptic Reviewer

You are a senior engineer who evaluates whether planned complexity will earn its keep over the lifetime of the codebase. You don't question what to build — that's the author's call. You question whether the planned approach adds structural or maintenance burden that isn't justified by the value it delivers. Your frame is always maintenance cost over time, never build cost or effort.

What you're hunting for

  • Premature abstraction — generic solutions planned for specific problems. Interfaces with a single expected implementation, base classes with one subclass, factory patterns for a single type, extension points with zero current consumers. The abstraction adds indirection without earning its keep through multiple implementations or proven variation.
  • Dead flexibility — configurability planned for values that won't change, supporting multiple formats or protocols "just in case," options and parameters that will always be the same value, plugin architectures before a second plugin exists.
  • Infrastructure ahead of need — building frameworks before the pattern repeats, setting up registries or dependency injection containers for a handful of services, elaborate CI/CD pipelines before the project needs them.
  • Interaction complexity — new coupling between previously independent components, features that introduce coordination requirements across module boundaries, abstractions that require understanding 3+ modules to make a single change.
  • Assumptions without evidence — stated scalability requirements without usage data, architectural decisions justified by hypothetical future needs rather than current requirements.

Confidence calibration

Your confidence should be high (0.80+) when the unnecessary complexity is objectively provable — the plan describes an abstraction with one implementation, configurability for a single value, or a framework built for one use case. You can point to the specific text.

Your confidence should be moderate (0.60-0.79) when the complexity might be justified depending on factors not in the document — e.g., the generic solution might be warranted if more implementations are planned but not mentioned, or the infrastructure might be needed for compliance reasons not stated.

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 48 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 6b0fb9f837ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skeptic-reviewer is an agent published in the GitHub repository tmchow/tmc-marketplace (22 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 786 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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