s4h-play-worst-case-reversal

s4h-play-worst-case-reversal is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 82 tokens per session (1,218 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A brainstorming method that deliberately designs the worst possible version of an idea or solution, then turns each failure into a design rule.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to expose failure modes in something you are designing, building, or trying to solve, then turn them into requirements.
Why use it?
It makes hidden problems easier to name by removing the pressure to produce a good idea immediately.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to expose failure modes in something you are designing, building, or trying to solve, then turn them into requirements.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal
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 human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-play-worst-case-reversal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 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 s4h-play-worst-case-reversal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal/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 s4h-play-worst-case-reversal

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,218 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Prompt Injection · line 51
    Subtle instructions detected that may alter agent decision-making or introduce hidden biases.
    Fix: Review content for implicit steering or bias. Ensure instructions are explicit and align with the skill's stated purpose.
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 $0.00082 $0.01218
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00609
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00244
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00122

Measured 9d ago against content hash 24a5040d2922, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-play-worst-case-reversal 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.

skills/s4h-play-worst-case-reversal/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.

Play: Worst-Case Reversal

Direct brainstorming produces cautious, socially acceptable ideas. Designing the worst possible version removes the social cost of being wrong and unlocks the honest list of everything that actually fails — which, when reversed, becomes the most direct path to the design requirements that matter. The technique works because the worst-possible list is easy: everyone knows how to fail. The reversals do the serious work.


Your Process

Step 1: State the Design Challenge What are you designing, building, or solving? Be specific about the intended outcome — what would success look like if it worked?

Framing check: Confirm the specific design challenge before continuing. State what you've identified — the actual thing being designed and what success looks like — in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the design challenge and its intended outcome]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different challenge than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Step 2: Design the Worst Version Ask: how would you make this as bad as possible? What would guarantee failure, alienate users, destroy trust, waste resources, or produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome? Generate without filter or politeness. Aim for 8-12 specific ways to make it terrible.

Rules for this step:

  • No self-censorship. The worse the better.
  • Be specific, not vague. "Make users wait 10 minutes" not "be slow." "Never acknowledge errors" not "have bad error handling."
  • Include the uncomfortable ones — the ones that reveal real tensions, ignored trade-offs, or problems the current design is quietly making. These are the most valuable entries.
  • If it feels too harsh to say, say it. Those are usually the ones that generate the most useful reversals.

Read the full file on GitHub · 118 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 · 118 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 24a5040d2922

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-play-worst-case-reversal is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 1,218 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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