skeptic-review

skeptic-review is a skill for Claude Code from Avyayalaya/agent-council. It costs 124 tokens per session (3,843 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A critical review that tests the main claims in a document from the viewpoint of a well-informed opponent.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to challenge important proposals, analyses, pitches, memos, and other documents before they are shared.
Why use it?
It finds weak arguments, missing counterpoints, failures that could undermine the whole piece, and places where correlation is mistaken for causation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument; mentions Codex.

Part of the agent-council plugin — 5 skills, 2 commands, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to challenge important proposals, analyses, pitches, memos, and other documents before they are shared.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review
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 Avyayalaya/agent-council --skill skeptic-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Avyayalaya/agent-council

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-council, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 2 commands, 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 skeptic-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review/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-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avyayalaya/agent-council/skeptic-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 124 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,843 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 $0.00124 $0.03843
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.01921
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00769
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00384

Measured 12d ago against content hash d4879f77473b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skeptic-review 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.

skills/skeptic-review/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Run an adversarial steelman pass on a text artifact before it ships. The Skeptic role takes the perspective of the smartest hostile reader the artifact will ever meet — the rival PM with a competing system, the reviewer two promotion levels above the author, the buyer who has already heard six worse pitches today — and surfaces the load-bearing weakness that would let that reader reject the artifact on substance.

The Skeptic is not a stylistic editor or a generic critic. It is a structural skeptic: it looks for the place where the argument's spine breaks under weight. Which claim, if proven false, would collapse the rest? Which counter-position would a sharp opponent raise that the artifact never addresses? Where does the author confuse correlation with causation, or sample with population?

This Skill encodes the Skeptic role from the agent-council 5-deliberator quality gate. Use it standalone for a fast structural critique, or compose with the other 4 deliberator skills to run a Council-style review of a Tier-1 artifact.

When to Use / When NOT to Use

Use this skill when:

  • You have a draft of a Tier-1 artifact (external-facing, identity-shaping, or irreversible) and want a structural critique before it ships
  • A spec or memo will face a hostile reader (skeptical VP, rival PM, board member) and you want the load-bearing weakness surfaced before they find it
  • You suspect the argument has a counter-position the author has not defanged and you want to name it explicitly
  • You need to triangulate whether a claim is genuinely load-bearing or rhetorical filler before letting it ship as a headline
  • You are running a multi-deliberator review and need the Skeptic seat filled

Do NOT use this skill when:

  • You need a voice critique (banned patterns, register check, CXO test) — use voice-identity-review instead
  • You need an evidence-tier audit (per-claim tier assignment, calibration check) — use evidence-calibration-review instead
  • You need a strategic-fit check (goal alignment, opportunity cost, kill criteria) — use strategy-stakes-review instead
  • You need a SHIP/REVISE/HOLD verdict — use adjudicator-synthesis after running Skeptic plus at least one other deliberator
  • The artifact is a personal note or internal scratch document that does not warrant adversarial review
  • You want stylistic improvements or rewrites — the Skeptic identifies breaks, never patches them

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 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 · 250 lines · 124 tokens per session scan A d4879f77473b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skeptic-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository Avyayalaya/agent-council (10 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 124 tokens to every session and 3,843 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories