decision-critic

name	decision-critic
description	(user)

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 the skill base directory (provided by Claude Code on skill load) to locate the script:

python3 "${CLAUDE_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

Academic Grounding

This workflow synthesizes three empirically-validated techniques:

1. Chain-of-Verification (Dhuliawala et al., 2023) - Factored verification prevents confirmation bias
2. Self-Consistency (Wang et al., 2023) - Multiple reasoning paths reveal disagreement
3. Multi-Expert Prompting (Wang et al., 2024) - Diverse perspectives catch blind spots