devils-advocate

devils-advocate is a skill for Claude Code from flonat/flonat-research. It costs 56 tokens per session (1,579 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research-review tool that challenges the assumptions, explanations, and arguments behind a written claim or study design.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to stress-test research ideas, examine competing hypotheses, find weaknesses in an argument, or plan revisions.
Why use it?
It helps expose weak reasoning and alternative explanations before you commit to an argument or submit a paper.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; $skill-name invocation.

Good fit Use it to stress-test research ideas, examine competing hypotheses, find weaknesses in an argument, or plan revisions.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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/flonat/flonat-research/devils-advocate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/flonat/flonat-research/devils-advocate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/flonat/flonat-research/devils-advocate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/flonat/flonat-research/devils-advocate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,579 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 $0.00056 $0.01579
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00790
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00158

Measured 4d ago against content hash d2a182609200, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, 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 4d 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 · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Devil's Advocate Skill

Challenge research assumptions and identify weaknesses in your arguments.

Purpose

Based on Scott Cunningham's Part 3: "Creating Devil's Advocate Agents for Tough Problems" - addressing the "LLM thing of over-confidence in diagnosing a problem."

For formal code audits with replication scripts and referee reports, use the Referee 2 agent instead (.claude/agents/referee2-reviewer.md). This skill is for quick adversarial feedback on arguments, not systematic audits.

When to Use

  • Before submitting a paper
  • When stuck on a research problem
  • When you want to stress-test an argument
  • During paper revision planning

When NOT to Use

  • Code audits — use the Referee 2 agent instead
  • Replication verification — use the Referee 2 agent instead
  • Quick proofreading — just ask for a read-through
  • When you want validation — this skill is designed to challenge, not affirm

Workflow

  1. Understand the claim — Read the paper/argument being evaluated
  2. Generate competing hypotheses — If evaluating a research question or design, load references/competing-hypotheses.md and generate 3-5 rival explanations before critiquing
  3. Run the debate — Use the multi-turn debate protocol below (default) or single-shot mode for quick checks
  4. Deliver the verdict — Synthesize surviving critiques with severity ratings

Multi-Turn Debate Protocol (Default)

Inspired by the simulated scientific debates in Google's AI Co-Scientist. A one-shot critique is easy for an LLM to produce but often superficial. Multi-turn debates force each critique to survive a defense, filtering out weak objections and sharpening the strong ones.

Round 1: Adversarial Critic

Adopt the persona of a hostile but competent reviewer. Challenge on:

  1. Theoretical foundations — Are the assumptions justified?
  2. Methodology — Limitations? Alternative approaches?
  3. Data — Selection bias? Measurement issues? External validity?
  4. Causal claims — Alternative explanations? Confounders?
  5. Contribution — Novel enough? Does it matter?

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 4d ago First seen · 133 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A d2a182609200

Subscribe to this mod's changes

devils-advocate is a skill published in the GitHub repository flonat/flonat-research (132 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 1,579 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 2026-09-03.

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