pre-mortem

pre-mortem is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NickCrew/Claude-Cortex. It costs 17 tokens per session (331 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning exercise that imagines how an initiative could fail and identifies safeguards before work begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list failure scenarios, assign owners and effort to mitigations, and turn safeguards into tasks or feature ideas.
Why use it?
It helps reveal technical, user, organisational, market, and compliance risks early, reducing avoidable rework.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to list failure scenarios, assign owners and effort to mitigations…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/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 NickCrew/Claude-Cortex --skill pre_mortem
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NickCrew/Claude-Cortex

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 pre-mortem

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/pre_mortem.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/pre_mortem)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/pre_mortem"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/pre_mortem.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 331 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 $0.00017 $0.00331
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00166
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00066
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00033

Measured 3d ago against content hash dbf53c20314b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 3d 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/collaboration/pre_mortem/SKILL.md · 49 lines

What it actually says

/collaboration:pre-mortem

Use when planning initiatives where early risk surfacing saves rework.

Inputs

  • Initiative and horizon (30/90/180 days)
  • Success definition
  • Known risks/compliance constraints

Steps

  1. Define success state and horizon (default 90 days).
  2. List top failure modes across tech, UX, org, market, compliance.
  3. For each, propose mitigations/guardrails with Effort (S/M/L) and Owner.
  4. Pull 2–3 mitigations that double as feature ideas.
  5. Create Tasks for guardrails or pass to /ctx:plan.

Output Template

### Success State (horizon)
### Failure Modes
### Mitigations & Guardrails (effort, owner)
### Feature Candidates from Mitigations
### Immediate Tasks

Pairings

  • Run after /collaboration:concept-forge to sanity-check top concepts.
  • Feed guardrails into /dev:code-review or security skills as needed.
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. 3d ago First seen · 49 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A dbf53c20314b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pre-mortem is a skill published in the GitHub repository NickCrew/Claude-Cortex (37 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 331 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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