devils-advocate

devils-advocate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from t0ddharris/claude-code-skills. It costs 164 tokens per session (2,370 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review skill that sends your work to Google Gemini for a separate, adversarial critique. It can examine decisions, plans, writing, marketing materials, or code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to challenge a strategy, campaign, landing page, blog draft, pricing decision, or code change.
Why use it?
A second model from a different provider may notice assumptions or weaknesses missed during your own review. It helps pressure-test work before you publish or ship it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

Good fit Use it to challenge a strategy, campaign, landing page, blog draft, pricing…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/devils-advocate
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 t0ddharris/claude-code-skills --skill devils-advocate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/t0ddharris/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 devils-advocate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/devils-advocate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/devils-advocate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/devils-advocate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/t0ddharris/claude-code-skills/devils-advocate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 164 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,370 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 $0.00164 $0.02370
Opus 5 $0.00082 $0.01185
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00474
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00237

Measured 6d ago against content hash c66ba4a49c04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

devils-advocate 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/challenge.py), 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.

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.

.agents/skills/devils-advocate/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Devil's Advocate

Get a critique from an outside model (Google Gemini 3.1 Pro by default) to pressure-test work before it ships. The whole reason this skill exists is that Claude and the user may share the same blind spots after working on a piece of content together. Sending the work to a model in a different lineage surfaces weaknesses that neither of you will catch alone.

Never substitute your own critique for this tool. If you find yourself about to write "here's what I think the weak points are" without running the script, stop — you are defeating the entire purpose of the skill.


When to use this skill

Use it when the user explicitly asks for a second opinion, a devil's advocate read, or to poke holes in something. Also proactively suggest it when:

  • The user is about to ship high-stakes work (a public launch plan, executive-level messaging, a pricing decision, a bet-the-quarter initiative).
  • You and the user have been iterating for a while and the work feels "done" — fresh eyes matter most when confirmation bias is strongest.
  • The user is weighing a decision with several defensible answers (a strategy shift, a channel bet, an org change).
  • A plan makes a claim that would be expensive to get wrong (projected revenue, headcount, conversion lift).

Do NOT reach for this skill for quick copy edits, tactical wordsmithing, or requests the user clearly wants done inside Claude. This is a heavier tool meant for moments where an outside critique has real value.


Prerequisites

  • GOOGLE_AI_STUDIO_API_KEY must be available as an environment variable or in a .env file at your project root.
  • The script uses only the Python standard library. No installs required.

If the key is missing, the script will exit with a clear error and a link to create one.


How to run it

The script lives at .claude/skills/devils-advocate/scripts/challenge.py (relative to your project root, once the skill is installed in .claude/skills/).

1. Critique files

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 6d ago First seen · 203 lines · 164 tokens per session scan A c66ba4a49c04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

devils-advocate is a skill published in the GitHub repository t0ddharris/claude-code-skills (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 164 tokens to every session and 2,370 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.