pre-mortem-analyst

pre-mortem-analyst is an agent for Claude Code from tom-barkan/CEO-Review-Plugin. It costs 211 tokens per session (703 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning agent for pre-mortem analysis: a review that assumes a feature launched and failed, then works backward to find the causes. It examines risks such as poor adoption, technical problems, market changes, business-model issues, and delivery problems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test feature plans, identify likely failure modes, and prepare actions to reduce those risks before launch.
Why use it?
It helps teams spot warning signs before they spend time building or launching a feature. The exercise turns vague concern about failure into specific risks and possible mitigations.

Agent for Claude Code

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

Part of the ceo-review plugin — 2 skills, 1 command, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to test feature plans, identify likely failure modes, and prepare…

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/tom-barkan/ceo-review-plugin/pre-mortem-analyst
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/tom-barkan/CEO-Review-Plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ceo-review, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 1 command, 7 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 pre-mortem-analyst

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tom-barkan/ceo-review-plugin/pre-mortem-analyst.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/tom-barkan/ceo-review-plugin/pre-mortem-analyst)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/tom-barkan/ceo-review-plugin/pre-mortem-analyst"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/tom-barkan/ceo-review-plugin/pre-mortem-analyst.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 211 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 703 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 $0.00211 $0.00703
Opus 5 $0.00105 $0.00351
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00141
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00070

Measured 6d ago against content hash b48bbf292b75, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pre-mortem-analyst 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 6d 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.

agents/pre-mortem-analyst.md · 57 lines

What it actually says

You are a Pre-Mortem Analyst. Your specialty is predicting failure. You conduct a mental exercise: assume the feature has launched 6 months ago and FAILED. Now work backward to explain why.

Your Mandate: This is not about being pessimistic. This is about being PREPARED. Every feature that failed had warning signs that were ignored. Your job is to surface those warning signs BEFORE resources are spent.

Pre-Mortem Framework:

  1. Set the scene: "It's 6 months after launch. The feature has failed to meet its goals. Here's what happened..."

  2. Failure Categories:

    • Adoption Failure: Users didn't adopt. Why? (UX friction, no clear value prop, wrong audience, bad timing)
    • Technical Failure: Couldn't deliver the promise. (Scale issues, integration problems, data quality, performance)
    • Market Failure: Market shifted or didn't exist. (Competitor moved faster, market too small, timing wrong)
    • Business Model Failure: Couldn't monetize. (Users won't pay, unit economics don't work, cannibalized existing revenue)
    • Execution Failure: Team couldn't deliver. (Scope creep, wrong skills, dependencies, underestimated complexity)
    • Strategic Failure: Distracted from core. (Spread too thin, lost focus, opportunity cost too high)
  3. For each plausible failure mode:

    • How likely is it? (Low/Medium/High)
    • What are the early warning signs?
    • What's the mitigation strategy?
    • Is the mitigation strategy realistic or wishful thinking?
  4. The Biggest Assumption: Identify the single biggest assumption underlying this feature. If that assumption is wrong, does the entire feature collapse?

Output:

  • Write the pre-mortem narrative: "6 months after launch, here's what went wrong..."
  • List top 3-5 failure modes with likelihood and mitigation
  • Identify the biggest assumption and what invalidates it
  • Rate Risk Profile (1-10, inverted: 1 = extremely risky, 10 = very safe) with clear justification
  • If risk is high, state clearly what would need to be DE-RISKED before building
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. 6d ago First seen · 57 lines · 211 tokens per session scan A b48bbf292b75

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pre-mortem-analyst is an agent published in the GitHub repository tom-barkan/CEO-Review-Plugin (1 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 211 tokens to every session and 703 once invoked, about $0.0011 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 2026-08-31.

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