tribunal

tribunal is a skill for Claude Code from cukas/claudes-ai-buddies. It costs 29 tokens per session (1,140 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured debate skill for examining codebase questions through opposing arguments, questions, risk attacks, solution comparison, or failure analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for design choices, refactoring decisions, unclear technical questions, security reviews, comparing solutions, or investigating bugs and incidents.
Why use it?
It challenges assumptions and requires claims to be backed by file-and-line evidence, making technical decisions easier to test.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the claudes-ai-buddies plugin — 12 skills, 1 command, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it for design choices, refactoring decisions, unclear technical questions, security reviews, comparing solutions, or investigating bugs and incidents.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add cukas/claudes-ai-buddies
Claude Code
/plugin install claudes-ai-buddies

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claudes-ai-buddies, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 1 command, 1 hook.

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 tribunal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal/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 tribunal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cukas/claudes-ai-buddies/tribunal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,140 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 $0.00029 $0.01140
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00570
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00114

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3e30510477a5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tribunal 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/tribunal/SKILL.md · 118 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 118 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/tribunal — Multi-Mode AI Debate

Two AI buddies engage on a codebase question using one of six modes. Every claim requires FILE:LINE evidence.

Modes

Mode Flag AIs do Claude's role Best for
adversarial (default) Argue FOR vs AGAINST Judge — picks winner Binary decisions, should/shouldn't
socratic --socratic Probe assumptions with questions Synthesizer — surfaces insights Early exploration, unclear framing
steelman --steelman Argue the OTHER side's strongest case Calibrator — shows true strength of each side Avoiding confirmation bias
red-team --red-team Attack from different angles, no defense Risk assessor — prioritized vulnerability table Poking holes in designs/plans
synthesis --synthesis Each proposes a solution, then hybridize Merger — evaluates proposals + hybrid Finding a third option
postmortem --postmortem Investigate failure from different angles Investigator — unified timeline + root cause Bug investigation, incident analysis

How to invoke

/tribunal "Should we refactor the auth middleware?"
/tribunal --socratic "Is our error handling resilient enough?"
/tribunal --steelman "Should we migrate to microservices?"
/tribunal --red-team "Review our new payment flow"
/tribunal --synthesis "How should we restructure the data layer?"
/tribunal --postmortem "Why did the deploy fail yesterday?"
/tribunal --mode red-team "Audit the new API endpoints"

Step-by-step workflow

Phase 0: Setup

  1. Parse the question and mode. Check for mode flags (--socratic, --steelman, --red-team, --synthesis, --postmortem, or --mode X). Default: adversarial.
  2. Detect available buddies:
source "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/lib.sh"
AVAILABLE=$(ai_buddies_available_buddies)
  1. Require at least 2 buddies.
  2. Tell the user which buddies will participate, the mode, and round count.

Read the full file on GitHub · 118 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 118 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 3e30510477a5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tribunal is a skill published in the GitHub repository cukas/claudes-ai-buddies (9 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,140 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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