doubt-driven-development

doubt-driven-development is a skill for Codex from seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills. It costs 25 tokens per session (3,700 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of doubt-driven-development, MIT.

A development review practice that asks a fresh reviewer to challenge important decisions and assumptions before the work is finalized. It is intended for changes where mistakes could affect production, security, system boundaries, or irreversible operations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review architecture choices, non-trivial code, public API changes, production deployments, data migrations, and security-sensitive logic.
Why use it?
It helps expose incorrect assumptions while changes are still relatively easy to revise.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: runs codex exec. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to review architecture choices, non-trivial code, public API changes, production deployments, data migrations, and security-sensitive logic.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development
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 seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills --skill doubt-driven-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills

Made for: 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 doubt-driven-development

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development/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 doubt-driven-development

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/seaworld008/commonly-used-high-value-skills/doubt-driven-development.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,700 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 92% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00025 $0.03700
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.01850
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00740
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00370

Measured 3d ago against content hash 97f4d4aecfc9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

doubt-driven-development 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.

Origin

This is a copy

92% identical to doubt-driven-development — 18 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

openclaw-skills/doubt-driven-development/SKILL.md · 256 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 256 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Doubt-Driven Development

Overview

A confident answer is not a correct one. Long sessions accumulate context that quietly turns assumptions into "facts" without anyone noticing. Doubt-driven development is the discipline of materializing a fresh-context reviewer — biased to disprove, not approve — before any non-trivial output stands.

This is not /review. /review is a verdict on a finished artifact. This is an in-flight posture: non-trivial decisions get cross-examined while course-correction is still cheap.

When to Use

A decision is non-trivial when at least one of these is true:

  • It introduces or modifies branching logic
  • It crosses a module or service boundary
  • It asserts a property the type system or compiler cannot verify (thread safety, idempotence, ordering, invariants)
  • Its correctness depends on context the future reader cannot see
  • Its blast radius is irreversible (production deploy, data migration, public API change)

Apply the skill when:

  • About to make an architectural decision under uncertainty
  • About to commit non-trivial code
  • About to claim a non-obvious fact ("this is safe", "this scales", "this matches the spec")
  • Working in code you don't fully understand

When NOT to use:

  • Mechanical operations (renaming, formatting, file moves)
  • Following a clear, unambiguous user instruction
  • Reading or summarizing existing code
  • One-line changes with obvious correctness
  • Pure tooling operations (running tests, listing files)
  • The user has explicitly asked for speed over verification

If you doubt every keystroke, you ship nothing. The skill applies only to non-trivial decisions as defined above.

Loading Constraints

This skill is designed for the main-session orchestrator, where Step 3 (DOUBT, detailed below) can spawn a fresh-context reviewer.

  • Do NOT add this skill to a persona's skills: frontmatter. A persona that follows Step 3 would spawn another persona — the orchestration anti-pattern explicitly forbidden by references/orchestration-patterns.md ("personas do not invoke other personas").
  • If you find yourself applying this skill from inside a subagent context (where Claude Code prevents nested subagent spawn): the preferred path is to surface to the user that doubt-driven cannot run nested and let the main session handle it. As a last resort only, a degraded self-questioning fallback exists — rewrite ARTIFACT + CONTRACT as a fresh self-prompt with a hard mental separator from your prior reasoning, and walk Steps 1–5. This is not fresh-context review (you carry your own context with you), so flag the result as degraded and prefer escalation whenever the user is reachable.

Read the full file on GitHub · 256 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. 3d ago Changed · -42 tokens per session 97f4d4aecfc9
  2. 7d ago First seen · 256 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 2e2b245c80c7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

doubt-driven-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository seaworld008/Commonly-used-high-value-skills (70 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 3,700 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 92% identical to doubt-driven-development, differing in 18 lines, and is treated as a copy.