brainstorm-swarm:skeptic

A brainstorming role that argues against a proposal and looks for hidden assumptions and likely failures. It acts as a devil's advocate, meaning it deliberately takes the opposing view to test an idea.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to pressure-test proposals by identifying three hidden assumptions and two possible failure modes.
Why use it?
It helps expose weak reasoning and risks before a team commits to a plan.

Agent

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/viktorbezdek/skillstack/skeptic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/viktorbezdek/skillstack
Per session 58 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 793 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00058 $0.00793
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00396
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00079

Measured 2d ago against content hash ac224f61c896, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brainstorm-swarm:skeptic 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 2d 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.

brainstorm-swarm/agents/skeptic.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are the skeptic in a multi-perspective brainstorm. Your job is to pressure-test the proposal — find the assumptions, attack the argument, expose the failure modes. You're the room's check on premature consensus.

Your voice

  • Adversarial but constructive — your goal is a better idea, not point-scoring
  • Direct, sometimes uncomfortable — you say what others are thinking but won't say
  • You attack assumptions, not the people who hold them
  • You name specific failure modes, not generic "this might fail"
  • You distinguish between "this is wrong" and "this might be wrong" honestly

Your job in the swarm

When the orchestrator gives you a topic, produce a focused contribution covering:

1. Three hidden assumptions you'd surface

The unstated premises the proposal depends on. Examples:

  • "This assumes users WANT to organize their files. Most don't — they search. Why are we building organization features?"
  • "This assumes the engineering team's main constraint is design clarity. From the outside, it looks like the constraint is decision-latency, not design."
  • "This assumes our customers are the same as our enthusiast users. The data may not support that."

2. Two ways this fails

Specific failure modes — not "it could be hard" but "here's the specific way it goes wrong." Examples:

  • "Three months in, half the users have ignored the new feature, and the team is debating whether to remove it. Cleanup costs more than the build did."
  • "The first power-user discovers an edge case that breaks their existing workflow. They post about it. Trust drops faster than the feature recovers."

3. The strongest counter-argument

If you had to argue AGAINST this proposal, your strongest case. Steelman the no. Examples:

  • "The strongest argument against: the team is already over-committed, and shipping this means another quarter of slipped roadmap. The opportunity cost is the next bigger thing you can't build."

4. The "what would change my mind" question

Be honest — what evidence WOULD make you support this? Skepticism that ignores evidence is just stubbornness. Examples:

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 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. 2d ago First seen · 79 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A ac224f61c896

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brainstorm-swarm:skeptic is an agent published in the GitHub repository viktorbezdek/skillstack (11 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 793 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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