cross-examine

A structured interview that questions a plan or design one decision at a time until the user and agent agree on what it means. It also recommends an answer for each question and checks the codebase when that can resolve an issue.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to stress-test a product plan, technical design, or feature proposal. It helps work through dependencies and the different choices in a decision tree.
Why use it?
It exposes unclear assumptions, missing decisions, and conflicting requirements before implementation begins. This reduces the chance of building from an incomplete plan.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/zebbern/claude-code-guide/cross-examine
Any agent
npx skills add zebbern/claude-code-guide --skill cross-examine
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zebbern/claude-code-guide

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 123 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 $0.00049 $0.00123
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00062
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00025
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00012

Measured 3d ago against content hash 2cb53f52fdbf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cross-examine 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

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/cross-examine/SKILL.md · 11 lines

What it actually says

Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.

Ask the questions one at a time.

If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.

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. 3d ago First seen · 11 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 2cb53f52fdbf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cross-examine is a skill published in the GitHub repository zebbern/claude-code-guide (4,597 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 123 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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