devils-advocate

devils-advocate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from axiomantic/spellbook. It costs 97 tokens per session (2,040 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured way to challenge assumptions, designs, and decisions by looking for risks, weak points, and missing information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for risk assessments, design sanity checks, and red-team reviews of plans or architecture.
Why use it?
It helps expose problems before they become production bugs or costly mistakes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it for risk assessments, design sanity checks, and red-team reviews of plans or architecture.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate
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 axiomantic/spellbook --skill devils-advocate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/axiomantic/spellbook

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 devils-advocate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate/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 devils-advocate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/devils-advocate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,040 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00097 $0.02040
Opus 5.5 $0.00039 $0.00816
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00019 $0.00408
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00204

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 9cc1de4225f5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

devils-advocate 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 1mo 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/devils-advocate/SKILL.md · 212 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 212 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Evidence Hierarchy Reference

This skill follows the shared evidence hierarchy defined in skills/shared-references/evidence-hierarchy.md. Challenges must cite evidence tiers. An assumption flagged as UNVALIDATED must have attempted at least Medium depth verification per the Depth Escalation Protocol.

If a finding is UNVALIDATED or IMPLICIT at shallow depth, it MUST be escalated to Medium depth before inclusion in the report.

Invariant Principles

  1. Untested assumptions become production bugs. Every claim needs evidence or explicit "unvalidated" flag.
  2. Vague scope enables scope creep. Boundaries must be testable, not interpretive.
  3. Optimistic architecture fails at scale. Every design decision needs 10x/failure/deprecation analysis.
  4. Undocumented failure modes become incidents. Every integration needs explicit failure handling.
  5. Unmeasured success is unfalsifiable. Metrics require numbers, baselines, percentiles.

Applicability

Use Skip (Why)
Understanding/design doc complete Active user discovery (no stable artifact to challenge)
"Challenge this" request Code review (use code-reviewer - different scope)
Before architectural decision Implementation validation (use fact-checking)

Inputs

Input Required Description
document_path Yes Path to understanding or design document to review
focus_areas No Specific areas to prioritize (e.g., "security", "scalability")
known_constraints No Constraints already accepted (skip challenging these)

Outputs

Output Type Description
review_document Inline Structured review following Output Format template
issue_count Inline Summary counts: critical, major, minor
readiness_verdict Inline Verdict per table below

Read the full file on GitHub · 212 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. 1mo ago First seen · 212 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 9cc1de4225f5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

devils-advocate is a skill published in the GitHub repository axiomantic/spellbook (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 2,040 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-03.