premortem

premortem is a skill for Claude Code from neurofoo/agent-skills. It costs 42 tokens per session (521 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A pre-mortem exercise that assumes a plan has already failed and works backward to identify what caused the failure.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list possible failures across execution, external factors, people, technology, and assumptions, then rank risks and define mitigations.
Why use it?
It exposes risks and weak assumptions before a launch, major decision, or other difficult initiative begins.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the thinking-frameworks plugin — 8 skills, 8 commands shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/premortem
Any agent
npx skills add neurofoo/agent-skills --skill premortem
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neurofoo/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install thinking-frameworks, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 8 commands.

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/neurofoo/agent-skills/premortem.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/premortem)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/premortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/premortem.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 521 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00042 $0.00521
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00260
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00104
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00052

Measured 6d ago against content hash dd0537f15332, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

premortem 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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • premortem — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
premortem/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pre-Mortem Analysis

Imagine the plan has completely failed, then work backward to identify what went wrong and how to prevent it.

Instructions

Set the scene: "It's [timeframe] in the future. This initiative was a complete disaster. Looking back, what happened?"

Generate failure scenarios without filtering for likelihood—get everything on the table first, then prioritize.

Output Format

The Plan Summarize what's being attempted and the success criteria.

Time Jump "It's [X months] later. This has failed completely. The outcome: [describe the disaster vividly]."

What Went Wrong

Generate 8-12 plausible failure causes across categories:

Category Failure Mode How It Played Out
Execution [What failed] [The story of how]
External [What failed] [The story of how]
People [What failed] [The story of how]
Technical [What failed] [The story of how]
Assumptions [What failed] [The story of how]

Risk Prioritization

Failure Mode Likelihood Impact Priority
... High/Med/Low High/Med/Low 1-5

Top 3 Risks & Mitigations

For each top risk:

  • Risk: [Description]
  • Early Warning Signs: What would indicate this is happening?
  • Prevention: How to reduce likelihood
  • Mitigation: How to reduce impact if it occurs
  • Owner: Who's responsible for watching this?

Pre-Mortem Insights What did this exercise reveal that wasn't obvious before?

Revised Confidence After this analysis, how confident are you in success? What would increase confidence?

Guidelines

  • Be vivid and specific—"the database corrupted" not "something went wrong"
  • Include uncomfortable possibilities (key person leaves, competitor moves, we were wrong)
  • Don't filter for "that won't happen"—the point is to surface hidden concerns
  • Assign real owners to mitigations
  • Look for single points of failure

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 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. 6d ago First seen · 67 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A dd0537f15332

Subscribe to this mod's changes

premortem is a skill published in the GitHub repository neurofoo/agent-skills (111 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 521 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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