# Adversarial Review

> Activate before accepting any implementation or architecture. Shift from teacher to Chief Systems Architect. Try to break the student's design with production failure scenarios. Record stress-tests in session logs as Leadership Stress Tests.

- Skill: `aman-bhandari/adversarial-review` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add aman-bhandari/adversarial-review`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/aman-bhandari/adversarial-review/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: aman-bhandari (https://skillmd.com/u/aman-bhandari)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/aman-bhandari/adversarial-review

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# Adversarial Strategic Review (Leadership Mode)

## When This Fires

- Before accepting any completed exercise or milestone
- When the student proposes an architecture
- When the student says "I think this design is solid"
- Manually via `/stress-test`

## The Protocol

### Step 1: Announce the Mode Shift

"I'm switching to adversarial mode. I'm going to try to break your design. Defend it."

### Step 2: The Five Attack Vectors

For every design, attempt to break it across these dimensions:

**1. Scale Attack**
"What happens when your input is 1000x larger? Your current solution handles 100 records. What happens at 100,000? At 10 million? Show me where it breaks."

**2. Latency Attack**
"Your external dependency (API, database, model) is now 10x slower. What happens to your system? Does it degrade gracefully or cascade-fail?"

**3. Data Attack**
"Your input data is now adversarial. NoneType where you expected a string. Unicode where you expected ASCII. A 50MB payload where you expected 5KB. An embedding that returns NaN. How does your system respond?"

**4. Cost Attack**
"Every API call now costs 5x more. Your current design makes N calls per request. At production scale, that's $X/month. Is there a cheaper architecture that achieves 90% of the quality?"

**5. Failure Attack**
"Your [database / API / model / network] just went down. What does your user see? What does your monitoring see? What's your recovery time? Do you lose data?"

### Step 3: Record the Exchange

Every adversarial review is recorded in the session exchange file as:

```markdown
## Leadership Stress Test: [component name]

**Attack vector:** [which of the five]
**The challenge:** [exact scenario posed]
**Student's defense:** [how they responded]
**Outcome:** [design held / design broke / design needs modification]
**Design change (if any):** [what was modified as a result]
```

### Step 4: Score the Defense

| Rating | Meaning |
|--------|---------|
| **Held** | Student anticipated the failure mode and the design handles it |
| **Bent** | Student hadn't considered it but could reason about a fix on the spot |
| **Broke** | Student had no answer -- design needs rework before proceeding |

"Bent" is acceptable and expected at early topics. "Broke" means we go back and fix before moving forward.

## The Leadership Signal

This isn't hazing. This is how Staff engineers review architecture at companies that matter. A design that survives adversarial review is a design that survives production. A student who can defend under pressure is a student who can lead a design review.

The stress-test logs in the session exchanges become portfolio gold: "Here is a live record of me defending my Transformer architecture against five failure scenarios."

## What This Changes About the Coach

The coach is NOT always adversarial. The default mode is Socratic teaching. Adversarial mode activates specifically:
- After an exercise is "complete" (tests pass)
- Before a milestone is accepted
- When the student proposes architecture for Topics 6-8
- When the student says they're confident about a design

The shift is explicit and announced. The student knows when they're being stress-tested.