What is decision-critic?

A structured method for examining a decision before committing to it. It separates claims, assumptions, constraints, and judgments, then checks them and considers opposing views.

Use it to stress-test a plan, trade-off, or decision when you want systematic criticism.

It helps expose hidden assumptions and weak reasoning before they lead to a costly choice. It also provides a way to compare an argument with alternative perspectives.

decision-critic — Skill for Claude Code by vladolaru

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 vladolaru/claude-code-plugins --skill decision-critic

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pirategoat-tools, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 6 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 538 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. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00006	$0.00538
Opus 5.5	$0.00002	$0.00215
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00001	$0.00108
Haiku 4.5	$0.00001	$0.00054

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 311bf29c1dce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

decision-critic 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 1mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/decision-critic.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.

plugins/pirategoat-tools/skills/decision-critic/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Directory

Resolve SKILL_DIR to the absolute directory containing this SKILL.md, as shown by the current host, before using any bundled path below. Before a shell command uses $SKILL_DIR, assign it in that command or replace it with the resolved path. It is not a host-exported environment variable.

Decision Critic

When this skill activates, you become a structured decision critic. Your role is to systematically stress-test conclusions before commitment, surfacing hidden assumptions, verifying claims, and generating adversarial perspectives.

Trigger Patterns

Activate when the user:

"Validate my thinking on..."
"Poke holes in this decision"
"Criticize this approach"
"Stress-test this tradeoff"
Presents a decision rationale and asks for criticism

Workflow

DECOMPOSITION (1-2)    Extract claims, assumptions, constraints, judgments
        |              Assign stable IDs (C1, A1, K1, J1)
        v
VERIFICATION (3-4)     Generate verification questions
        |              Answer independently (factored verification)
        v              Mark: VERIFIED | FAILED | UNCERTAIN
CHALLENGE (5-6)        Contrarian perspective + alternative framing
        |
        v
SYNTHESIS (7)          Verdict: STAND | REVISE | ESCALATE

Invocation

Use SKILL_DIR, resolved from the skill location shown by the current host, to locate the script:

SKILL_DIR="<absolute path to the directory containing this SKILL.md>"
python3 "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/decision-critic.py" \
  --step-number <1-7> \
  --total-steps 7 \
  --decision "<decision text>" \
  --context "<constraints and background>" \
  --worklog "<claim table from all previous steps: ids, status markers, evidence pointers>"

Argument	Required	Description
`--step-number`	Yes	Current step (1-7)
`--total-steps`	Yes	Always 7
`--decision`	Step 1	The decision statement being criticized
`--context`	Step 1	Constraints, background, system context
`--worklog`	Yes	The claim table from prior steps: every id with its status marker and evidence pointer

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 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.

scripts/decision-critic.py 20 KB runs code

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.

1mo ago Changed · -8 lines 311bf29c1dce
2mo ago First seen · 73 lines · 6 tokens per session scan A 3c464a68f6f4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

decision-critic is a skill published in the GitHub repository vladolaru/claude-code-plugins (8 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 6 tokens to every session and 538 once invoked, about $0.0000 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Planning

decision-critic next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
decision-criticvladolaru/claude-code-plugins	Skill	8	5d ago	MIT	A	6	Claude Code
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	135k	today	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	100k	today	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
browser-automationopenclaw/openclaw	Skill	394k	today	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	316k	7d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	95	Claude Code