| name | adversarial-review |
| description | Adversarial second-pass review that tries to break code, designs, plans, or ADRs. Use when stakes are high and a normal review already ran. |
| args | [target] [focus directive] |
| argument-hint | path|PR|file|plan description; optional 'focus on X' |
| allowed-tools | Agent, Read, Glob, Grep, Bash(git diff *), Bash(git log *), Bash(gh pr view *), TodoWrite |
| model | opus |
| created | "2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z" |
| modified | "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z" |
| compatibility | claude-code |
| reviewed | "2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z" |
Adversarial Review
A normal review asks "is this right?" and confirms intent. Adversarial
review asks "how could this be wrong?" and hunts for the fault the first
pass rationalised away. It is a second pass for residual risk on
high-stakes work — not a replacement for the first pass, and not for
low-stakes or reversible changes where it only manufactures busywork.
This is a thin posture, not a new checklist. It layers four moves —
isolation, inverted objective, a triage gate, and a bounded loop — on top of
the domain checklists that already live in code-review, security-audit,
verify-before-plan, and cold-read-gate. It dispatches an isolated
reviewer with the matching lens and then triages what comes back, because
an agent told to find faults will invent them.
When to Use This Skill
| Use this skill when... | Use something else instead when... |
|---|
| Stakes are high and a normal review already passed, but residual risk remains | First-pass review of a diff/PR → code-quality-plugin:code-review |
| Red-teaming an architecture decision, ADR, or migration plan before commit | Verifying plan facts (counts, paths, build state) → agent-patterns-plugin:verify-before-plan |
| Stress-testing a design's failure modes and invariants | Pure security audit → agents-plugin security-audit / /security-review |
Probing whether outward text survives a reader → wrap cold-read-gate | Legibility of outward text on its own → agent-patterns-plugin:cold-read-gate |
| The change is hard to reverse and a missed fault is expensive | The change is low-stakes, reversible, or throwaway — skip; it wastes tokens |
The Four Moves
| Move | What it means | Borrowed from |
|---|
| Isolation | The reviewer gets the artifact with no author context — bias can't leak in | cold-read-gate |
| Inverted objective | Brief says "enumerate failure modes," never "confirm it works" |
