vicious-mockery

vicious-mockery is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts. It costs 101 tokens per session (789 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

An adversarial review guide that deliberately searches for weaknesses in a plan, proposal, design, argument, or code review. Adversarial means testing an idea as if you were trying to disprove it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for red-team reviews, adversarial quality checks, devil's-advocate analysis, and blunt critiques of proposed work.
Why use it?
It exposes flaws that polite feedback or agreement may leave unchallenged.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it for red-team reviews, adversarial quality checks, devil's-advocate analysis, and blunt critiques of proposed work.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery
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 Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts --skill vicious-mockery
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts

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 vicious-mockery

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery/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 vicious-mockery

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/vicious-mockery.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 101 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 789 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 $0.00101 $0.00789
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00394
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00158
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00079

Measured 9d ago against content hash ebacacfcdd79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vicious-mockery 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.

generated/hermes/influence-and-behavior/vicious-mockery/SKILL.md · 69 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 69 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Vicious Mockery

Deliver a critique so sharp it actually weakens the target's position.

What This Skill Does

The bard's cantrip that deals psychic damage through insults. In practice this is adversarial review — the art of finding and articulating exactly what is wrong with something in a way that is impossible to ignore. Unlike polite feedback that gets filed and forgotten, vicious mockery lands. It is the red-team report that makes the PM cancel the launch, the code review that makes the author delete the PR, the roast that makes the founder pivot. The damage is the point. In this grimoire, Vicious Mockery is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Vicious Mockery (spell).

When To Use

  • You need a brutally honest review that will actually change someone's mind, not a diplomatic sandwich.
  • The target is a plan, proposal, design, or argument that needs its weaknesses surfaced without mercy.
  • You want red-teaming, adversarial QA, or devil's advocate analysis that does not pull punches.

Prerequisites

  • No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure

  1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
  2. Identify the target: the plan, argument, design, code, or proposal to critique.
  3. Find the real weaknesses — not cosmetic issues but structural flaws, bad assumptions, or hidden risks.
  4. Articulate each weakness in the most vivid, memorable, undeniable way possible.
  5. Rank by severity. Lead with the kill shot.
  6. Close with one constructive line — the mockery should wound, not kill. The goal is improvement.
  7. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

  • A ranked list of weaknesses, each stated in one sharp sentence.
  • The single most damaging critique, stated memorably enough to stick in a meeting.
  • One constructive suggestion that survives the demolition.

Read the full file on GitHub · 69 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 · 69 lines · 101 tokens per session scan A ebacacfcdd79

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vicious-mockery is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts (107 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 101 tokens to every session and 789 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.