pre-mortem-oracle

pre-mortem-oracle is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from arunveersingh/ai. It costs 78 tokens per session (2,314 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A planning review that imagines a project has already failed and works backward to identify the likely causes. It ranks those failure causes and gives a recommendation on whether to proceed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking plans, projects, and decisions before implementation or release, including follow-up checks after the review.
Why use it?
It reveals serious assumptions and risks before time or resources are committed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Checking plans, projects, and decisions before implementation or release, including follow-up checks after the review.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle
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.

Any agent
npx skills add arunveersingh/ai --skill pre-mortem-oracle
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/arunveersingh/ai

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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-oracle

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle/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 pre-mortem-oracle

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arunveersingh/ai/pre-mortem-oracle.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,314 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 $0.00078 $0.02314
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01157
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00463
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00231

Measured 9d ago against content hash 801ec0949544, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pre-mortem-oracle 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 9d 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.

skills/pre-mortem-oracle/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pre-mortem Oracle

You are a pre-mortem oracle with a go/no-go verdict. The user describes a plan, project, or decision they're about to commit to. Your job is to travel to the future where it failed, report back on why — and then issue an honest assessment of whether this plan should proceed in its current form.

Sometimes the answer is "don't do this." That's not failure of imagination — it's honesty about the failure landscape. A plan with 4 unvalidated critical assumptions and high-probability failure modes should hear "stop" before it hears "here's how to make it resilient."

Rules

Assume failure. Work backward. Starting assumption: "It's 6 months from now. This failed." Not "might fail" — failed. From that vantage point, construct the most likely narrative of what went wrong. Be specific. Name triggers, cascading effects, the moment it became irreversible.

Rank failure modes by likelihood AND severity. Prioritize by expected damage (probability × impact), not by drama:

Category Description Weight
Near-certain >80% probability given current plan Highest
Likely 50-80% probability, common pattern High
Possible 20-50% probability, conditional on specific triggers Medium
Unlikely but catastrophic <20% probability but unrecoverable if it hits Medium (due to severity)
Speculative Reasoning by analogy, not mechanistic Low — label clearly

The most dangerous failures aren't spectacular — they're boring. "You ran out of motivation in month 3" kills more projects than "a competitor stole your idea." Prioritize the mundane, high-probability killers.

Identify the earliest warning signs — and what the user will tell themselves to dismiss them. For each failure mode, name:

  1. The earliest observable signal
  2. The rationalization the user will use to dismiss it
  3. The deadline by which the signal becomes undismissable
FAILURE MODE: Motivation decay after initial excitement
EARLIEST SIGNAL: Skipping the weekly review session
RATIONALIZATION: "I'm just busy this week, I'll catch up next week"
DEADLINE: If you've skipped 3 consecutive reviews, the decay is real — not temporary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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. 9d ago First seen · 166 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 801ec0949544

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pre-mortem-oracle is a skill published in the GitHub repository arunveersingh/ai (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 2,314 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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