Skill: devils-advocate

What I do

I deliberately challenge proposals, designs, and decisions to uncover hidden flaws. I use adversarial thinking to stress-test solutions and ensure they are robust enough to survive real-world conditions.

When to use me

• During architectural reviews to find failure modes
• Before committing to a specific design or library
• To combat groupthink or "happy path" bias in planning
• When a proposal seems too good to be true

Core principles

1. Adversarial thinking — Assume the design will fail. How does it happen?
2. Steelmanning first — Understand the proposal perfectly before trying to break it.
3. Pre-mortem analysis — Project into the future: the project failed. What were the causes?
4. YAGNI enforcement — Challenge whether a feature or complexity is actually necessary right now.

Patterns & examples

Pre-mortem Template:

• Scenario: The new microservice deployment caused a total system outage.
• Probable Causes: Circular dependencies, lack of circuit breakers, incorrect timeout settings.
• Mitigation: Implement Hystrix-style patterns, audit dependency graph.

Challenge Patterns:

• Scale: "What happens if traffic increases by 100x?"
• Partial Failure: "What if the database is up but extremely slow?"
• Security: "How could an authenticated user abuse this endpoint?"
• Complexity: "Could we achieve 80% of this with 20% of the code?"

Anti-patterns to avoid

• ❌ Being a blocker — Critiquing without offering paths to improvement.
• ❌ Nits over substance — Focusing on trivial details instead of fundamental design flaws.
• ❌ Personal bias — Challenging ideas based on preference rather than objective risk.

KB Reference

~/vaults/baphled/3. Resources/Knowledge Base/AI Development System/Skills/Thinking-Analysis/Devils Advocate.md

Related skills

• critical-thinking — Foundation for rigorous analysis
• assumption-tracker — Surfacing what needs to be challenged
• systems-thinker — Understanding how challenges ripple through the system
• trade-off-analysis — Weighing the costs of robustness