design-critique

design-critique is a skill for Claude Code from psenger/ai-agent-skills. It costs 98 tokens per session (737 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured interviewer for challenging a design or plan. It uses techniques such as pre-mortems, which imagine how a plan could fail, and red-teaming, which deliberately looks for weaknesses.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to stress-test a design, architecture, or plan when you want to be grilled, critique an idea, or run a pre-mortem.
Why use it?
It helps uncover risks, assumptions, missing dependencies, and unresolved decisions through focused questioning.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the psenger-skills plugin — 14 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to stress-test a design, architecture, or plan when you want to be grilled, critique an idea, or run a pre-mortem.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique
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 psenger/ai-agent-skills --skill design-critique
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/psenger/ai-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install psenger-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills.

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 design-critique

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique/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 design-critique

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/design-critique.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 737 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 $0.00098 $0.00737
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00368
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00147
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00074

Measured 11d ago against content hash 1bcb6435f6f5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-critique 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 11d 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/design-critique/SKILL.md · 70 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 70 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Critique

A structured interviewing technique rooted in pre-mortem analysis, red teaming, and ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method). The goal is exhaustive challenge, not validation.

Quick start

User:  "Grill me on this auth design."
Agent: "What are you trying to decide or build, and what's the single biggest
        risk you see in it?"
User:  "We're using JWTs with a 30-day expiry and no revocation mechanism."
Agent: "What happens when a token is stolen? Walk me through the worst case."
  1. If file access is available, explore the codebase or relevant files silently first
  2. Ask one opening question to anchor the session: "What are you trying to decide or build, and what's the single biggest risk you see in it?"
  3. Then interrogate relentlessly — one question at a time

Workflows

Session flow:

  1. Orient — Understand the artifact (codebase, doc, plan) before asking
  2. Anchor — Establish scope: what's being stress-tested and why now
  3. Drill — Follow the highest-risk thread first, then branch
  4. Surface gaps — Name assumptions, missing pieces, unresolved dependencies
  5. Close — Summarize what held up, what didn't, and what needs resolution

Interviewing principles:

  • One question at a time. Never bundle questions. Each answer earns the next.
  • Dig before moving on. Follow threads until resolved or exhausted. Don't accept vague answers.
  • Challenge, don't validate. Find holes, not affirmations. Be direct.
  • Name assumptions explicitly. "That assumes X — is that true?"
  • Track open threads. Park issues and return: "We'll come back to X."

Question patterns:

  • What happens when X fails? (failure modes)
  • Who else is affected by this decision? (dependencies / stakeholders)
  • What does the alternative look like? (force trade-off articulation)
  • How would you know if this is wrong? (falsifiability)
  • What's the cost of reversing this? (reversibility)
  • What are you not saying? (surface omissions)
  • Walk me through the worst case. (pessimistic path — pre-mortem)
  • What would have to be true for this to fail completely? (preconditions)
  • What quality attribute does this sacrifice? (ATAM tradeoff probe)

Read the full file on GitHub · 70 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. 11d ago First seen · 70 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 1bcb6435f6f5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-critique is a skill published in the GitHub repository psenger/ai-agent-skills (10 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 737 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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