cross-critique

cross-critique is a command for coding agents from FerroxLabs/ijfw. It costs 65 tokens per session (3,575 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that tests a decision, change, or other target from three different viewpoints: technical, strategic, and user experience.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to challenge code changes, plans, or proposals, then compare and sort the strongest counterarguments.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance that one reviewer’s assumptions or blind spots hide important objections. It ranks objections by how likely they are to remain convincing after a reply.

Command

Part of the ijfw plugin — 18 commands, 37 agents, 1 MCP server shipped together

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 commands/ferroxlabs/ijfw/cross-critique
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/FerroxLabs/ijfw

Or install ijfw, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 commands, 37 agents, 1 MCP server.

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 cross-critique

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ferroxlabs/ijfw/cross-critique.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/ferroxlabs/ijfw/cross-critique)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/ferroxlabs/ijfw/cross-critique"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ferroxlabs/ijfw/cross-critique.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,575 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 $0.00065 $0.03575
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.01788
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00715
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00358

Measured 5d ago against content hash efb73bd80dd0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cross-critique 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 5d 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.

claude/commands/cross-critique.md · 339 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 339 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Stress-test any target against three adversarial perspectives simultaneously. Solves "a single reviewer's blind spots." Unlike cross-audit (which reviews for correctness/security/ops/maint), cross-critique hunts for the hardest counter-arguments to your position -- then ranks them by how likely each argument is to survive a rebuttal. High-survival counter-args are the ones worth acting on first.

Subcommands

Form Behavior
/cross-critique Zero-arg auto-pick. Detect target from git state (staged → unstaged → last commit). Fire all three angles in parallel.
/cross-critique <target> Named target, same parallel fan-out.
/cross-critique --with <id> [target] Override one auditor slot: codex, gemini, opencode, aider, copilot, claude. Target optional.
/cross-critique list Show roster with self marker. No requests generated.
/cross-critique compare Read all response files, score by rebuttal survival, render ranked table, archive.

Smart target auto-detection (bare /cross-critique)

When invoked without a target, run this detection cascade and use the first non-empty result:

  1. Staged changes -- git diff --cached --name-only
  2. Unstaged changes -- git diff --name-only
  3. Last commit -- git diff HEAD~1 --name-only
  4. If all empty: print the roster and ask "what would you like critiqued?"

Report which step succeeded:

Cross-critique target auto-detected: 1 staged file(s)
  claude/commands/cross-critique.md
(Override with /cross-critique <path> or /cross-critique --with <id> <path>.)

If >5 files, group in request body but list all paths. If a single file >2000 lines, use the diff hunks rather than the full file.

The natural-language phrase "challenge this from every angle" / "adversarial critique" fires the intent router (mcp-server/src/intent-router.js), which nudges Claude to invoke /cross-critique automatically -- same auto-detect flow runs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 339 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. 5d ago First seen · 339 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A efb73bd80dd0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cross-critique is a command published in the GitHub repository FerroxLabs/ijfw (210 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 3,575 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.