majiayu000 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
- Adversarial thinking — Assume the design will fail. How does it happen?
- Steelmanning first — Understand the proposal perfectly before trying to break it.
- Pre-mortem analysis — Project into the future: the project failed. What were the causes?
- 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 analysisassumption-tracker— Surfacing what needs to be challengedsystems-thinker— Understanding how challenges ripple through the systemtrade-off-analysis— Weighing the costs of robustness