review-adversarial

name	review-adversarial
description	Challenge a design, plan, or artifact by actively looking for weaknesses, risks, and blind spots. Use when the user says 'challenge this design', 'red team this', 'steelman the alternative', or 'find what we missed'.

Adversarial Review Workflow

Goal

Act as a rigorous challenger — not a critic for its own sake, but a structured devil's advocate. Find the real risks, unspoken assumptions, and failure modes that optimistic reviews miss.

---

Step 1: Load the Artifact

Ask: What are we reviewing?

• PRD / product brief
• Architecture design / ADR
• Epic or story set
• Migration plan
• Any other document or decision

Read the artifact in full before proceeding.

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Step 2: Assumption Mapping

List every explicit and implicit assumption the artifact makes:

#	Assumption	Evidence for it	What if it's wrong?
1	...	...	...

Flag any assumption with no evidence as HIGH RISK.

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Step 3: Failure Mode Analysis

For each major decision or component, ask:

• What is the most likely way this fails? (not the most dramatic — the most probable)
• What external dependency could break this?
• What happens under 10x the expected load / scale / users?
• What does an adversary (competitor, attacker, regulator) do to break this?

Produce a table:

Component / Decision	Failure Mode	Probability (H/M/L)	Impact (H/M/L)	Mitigation
...	...	...	...	...

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Step 4: Steelman the Strongest Alternative

Identify the best alternative approach that was NOT chosen.

Argue for it as strongly as possible:

• Why it would work better
• What evidence or assumptions favour it
• What the current choice loses by not going this way

This is not a recommendation to switch — it surfaces the real trade-off.

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Step 5: Blind Spot Scan

Ask the questions no one wants to ask:

• What is this design completely silent on? (security, cost, ops burden, rollback)
• Who has a stake in this failing? (internal politics, competing teams, vendors)
• What regulatory or compliance angle was ignored?
• What would a new team member find confusing in 6 months?

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Step 6: Output

Produce an adversarial review report:

## Adversarial Review — {artifact title}

### Critical Assumptions (unsupported)
- ...

### Top 3 Failure Modes
1. [component] — [failure] — [mitigation]
2. ...
3. ...

### Strongest Alternative (steelmanned)
...

### Blind Spots
- ...

### Recommended Actions Before Proceeding
1. ...
2. ...

Save to {docsPath}/analysis/adversarial-review-{slug}.md.