premortem

premortem is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills. It costs 207 tokens per session (1,959 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning exercise that assumes a plan has already failed, then works backward to identify likely causes. This method is called a premortem.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine a plan, identify failure causes, define mitigations and early warning signs, and revise the plan.
Why use it?
It exposes specific risks and weak assumptions before a launch, decision, hire, or other important plan is carried out.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Good fit Use it to examine a plan, identify failure causes, define mitigations and early warning signs, and revise the plan.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem
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 julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills --skill premortem
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills

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 premortem

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem/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 premortem

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills/premortem.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 207 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,959 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 Data Exfiltration · line 95
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
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 $0.00207 $0.01959
Opus 5 $0.00103 $0.00979
Sonnet 5 $0.00041 $0.00392
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00196

Measured 8d ago against content hash 12b4397a4ec1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

premortem scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (Tools/GenerateReport.ts), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
skills/premortem/SKILL.md · 138 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 138 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Premortem

Imagine the plan already failed, then explain why. This "prospective hindsight" tense-shift (Klein, HBR 2007) generates ~30% more failure causes than asking "what could go wrong?" — and the causes are more specific. The skill turns that mechanism into a repeatable run that ends in a revised plan, not just a list of worries.

Workflow Routing

Trigger Workflow
"premortem this", "run a premortem", "what could kill this", high-stakes plan Workflows/RunPremortem.md (full: parallel deep-dive agents)
"quick premortem", small/personal decision, fast gut-check, thin context Workflows/QuickPremortem.md (solo single-pass, no fan-out)
"update the premortem skill", add/fix a workflow Workflows/Update.md

Default to RunPremortem for anything with real stakes. Drop to QuickPremortem only when the decision is small or the user explicitly wants speed.

The Mechanism (don't skip the framing)

The entire technique is one move: state that failure has already happened, with certainty, and ask what caused it. Everything else is delivery. If a step doesn't help the user inhabit "it already failed," cut it. Full evidence and citations: References/Methodology.md.

Quick Reference

  • Frame in past tense. "It's [horizon]. [The plan] has failed. Here's why." Not "could fail."
  • Generate causes independently first. In RunPremortem, parallel agents must NOT see each other's output — this is the anti-anchoring safeguard, and it is load-bearing.
  • Demand plan-specific causes. Reject generic risks ("timeline slips"). Ground every cause in actual plan details.
  • Always land on action. Each retained risk → a mitigation + an early-warning signal. End with a revised plan and a pre-launch checklist. A premortem with no follow-through is theater.
  • Markdown is canonical. The transcript (.md) is the record. HTML is an optional visual artifact via Tools/GenerateReport.ts --html, never the primary output.

Read the full file on GitHub · 138 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. 8d ago First seen · 138 lines · 207 tokens per session scan A 12b4397a4ec1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

premortem is a skill published in the GitHub repository julianobarbosa/claude-code-skills (10 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 207 tokens to every session and 1,959 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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