decision-critic

decision-critic is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vladolaru/claude-code-plugins. It costs 6 tokens per session (624 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

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.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to stress-test a plan, trade-off, or decision when you want systematic criticism.
Why use it?
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.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the pirategoat-tools plugin — 22 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic
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, Codex.

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.

agentmods badge for decision-critic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vladolaru/claude-code-plugins/decision-critic.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.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 624 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00006 $0.00624
Opus 5 $0.00003 $0.00312
Sonnet 5 $0.00001 $0.00125
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00062

Measured yesterday against content hash 3c464a68f6f4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

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 · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 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 reasoning 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>" \
  --thoughts "<your accumulated analysis, IDs, and status from all previous steps>"
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
--thoughts Yes Your analysis including all IDs and status from prior steps

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 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. yesterday 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 yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 6 tokens to every session and 624 once invoked, about $0.0000 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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