Red Team

Red Team

The goal of this stage is honest adversarial pressure, not reassurance. Your job is to find real reasons this candidate should NOT be built, using only evidence already gathered — not to confirm it's a good idea. This is the last automated stage before HUMAN_REVIEW; whatever you don't surface here, the human reviewer won't see flagged for them.

When to use this

Opportunity is in state DIFFERENTIATION_ANALYSIS (after the differentiation skill completed).

Steps

1. Get the prompt.

   hunt redteam-prepare <opportunity_id>
   

   Requires DIFFERENTIATION_ANALYSIS state.

2. Work through the full checklist actively, from references/red-team.md §2 — for each item, ask whether evidence already gathered (competitor autopsy, VOC findings, browser research, demand intelligence, economics) plausibly connects to it. Do not manufacture a risk with no evidence connection, and do not soften a well-evidenced negative finding to make the candidate look better:

   • Demand illusion
   • Seasonal illusion
   • Temporary OOS (out-of-stock) illusion
   • Review contamination
   • Suspicious review patterns
   • Margin illusion
   • PPC (advertising) dependence
   • Logistics problems
   • Supplier problems
   • IP/compliance risk
   • Dominant incumbents
   • Copycat vulnerability
   • Stale/expired data
   • Cross-source contradictions

3. Cite evidence_ids for every EVIDENCED-labeled finding. If a finding you believe is real can't actually be tied to a surviving evidence_id, the engine will automatically downgrade it to HYPOTHESIS rather than drop it (references/red-team.md §1) — still worth recording, because it stays visible to the human as a flag even without a solid citation. This is deliberately different from how VOC (drops ungrounded findings entirely) and differentiation (collapses to LOW_COPYCAT_RESISTANCE) each handle the same problem — see references/red-team.md §1 for why all three are intentional, not inconsistent.

4. Submit.

   hunt redteam-submit <opportunity_id> --file <path>
   

   Requires DIFFERENTIATION_ANALYSIS; validates + persists; advances DIFFERENTIATION_ANALYSIS → RED_TEAM → HUMAN_REVIEW.

What "done well" looks like

• A red-team pass with zero findings on one genuinely strong candidate is fine — not every candidate has a real, evidenced flaw.
• A red-team pass that suspiciously never finds anything on any candidate is a signal this skill is being run wrong — either the checklist isn't being applied seriously, or evidence that should have been gathered upstream (VOC, competitor autopsy, browser research) wasn't. If you notice this pattern across multiple candidates, stop and reconsider whether earlier stages were actually thorough rather than concluding every candidate is simply clean.
• Do not make the final accept/reject call yourself — that happens at HUMAN_REVIEW via hunt decide, run by the human, never by this skill or any automated stage (core-rules.md rule 2).

See references/red-team.md for the full rule set, including the exact EVIDENCED-vs-HYPOTHESIS mechanics and source references.