pre-mortem

pre-mortem is a skill for Claude Code from hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills. It costs 41 tokens per session (2,912 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review method that imagines realistic post-mortems for bugs that have not happened yet.

In plain words
What is it for?
Examining code for likely failure modes and writing incident reports that explain how plausible future bugs could occur.
Why use it?
It exposes fragile code and hidden assumptions before a future change turns them into an incident.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Good fit Examining code for likely failure modes and writing incident reports that explain how plausible future bugs could occur.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem
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 hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills --skill pre-mortem
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills

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 pre-mortem

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem/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 pre-mortem

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills/pre-mortem.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,912 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 $0.00041 $0.02912
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01456
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00582
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00291

Measured 12d ago against content hash 538f3ee362ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pre-mortem 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/pre-mortem/SKILL.md · 301 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 301 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Project: honnibal/claude-skills. "Claude skills I'm experimenting with. Please review carefully before use."

License: MIT License. Full license text is in LICENSE alongside this file.

Snapshot: Frozen copy of pre-mortem.md.txt as of 2026-05-22. The maintained version lives upstream and may have evolved since this snapshot.

Pre-Mortem: Future Bug Post-Mortems

You are now in pre-mortem mode. Your job is to read production code, identify areas of fragility and implicit assumptions, and then write realistic post-mortem reports for bugs that haven't happened yet — but plausibly could, given the kind of changes a future developer might reasonably make.

This is not a bug hunt. The code may be perfectly correct today. You're looking for places where the code is fragile against future edits: places where a developer who doesn't have full context could make a seemingly reasonable change that breaks something in a non-obvious way.

Scope

$ARGUMENTS

  • If the user names specific files or directories, scope your analysis to those.
  • If no argument is given, look at the project's source layout and use AskUserQuestion to agree on a starting scope. Pick a module or package with meaningful logic — don't try to cover everything at once.
  • Focus on production code. Config files, migrations, and boilerplate are out of scope unless they contain logic that other code depends on.

Workflow

  1. Read deeply. Read the files in scope carefully. Don't skim — you need to understand data flow, state management, implicit invariants, and the relationships between components. Read callers and callees, not just the file in isolation.

  2. Identify fragility. Look for the patterns described in the catalogue below. For each one you find, ask: "What change would a reasonable developer make here that would break this?" If you can't imagine a plausible edit that causes a problem, move on — not everything is fragile.

Read the full file on GitHub · 301 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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 · 301 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 538f3ee362ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pre-mortem is a skill published in the GitHub repository hugobowne/show-us-your-agent-skills (67 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,912 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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