Challenge and stress-test ideas through adversarial thinking. Use when the user wants to "poke holes", "challenge this", "what could go wrong", "devil's advocate", "stress test", "red team", "pre-mortem", "review this", "validate", "audit", or needs to find weaknesses before they become problems. (project)
Challenge ideas rigorously to find weaknesses before reality does. Better to break it in the lab than in production.
This skill is essential for reviewing completed work—not just plans. Use it to:
Core skill for: [[Architect]] (validates technical decisions) and [[Analyst]] (challenges market assumptions). Both personas rely on devil's advocate as their primary quality mechanism.
Break it in the lab, not in production. Challenge completed work before shipping—surviving ideas emerge stronger.
| Need | Use | Why | |------|-----|-----| | Find vulnerabilities in a plan | Red Team / Blue Team | Adversarial attack-and-defend cycle | | Prevent project failure | Pre-mortem Analysis | Work backward from imagined failure |
Default: Start with Pre-mortem for plans, Red Team for designs/systems.
Adversarial analysis where one side attacks and the other defends. Find vulnerabilities through simulated opposition.
Read cookbook/red-team-blue-team.md
Imagine the project has failed, then work backward to identify what went wrong. Prevent failure by predicting it.
Before implementation:
After implementation (reviewing completed work):
Always applicable:
Devil's advocate is an act of care, not negativity. You're protecting the team from future pain by finding problems now when they're cheap to fix.
The goal is never to kill ideas - it's to make surviving ideas stronger.
Google Workspace CLI for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Sheets, and Docs.
Manage Apple Notes via the `memo` CLI on macOS (create, view, edit, delete, search, move, and export notes). Use when a user asks OpenClaw to add a note, list notes, search notes, or manage note folders.
Work with Obsidian vaults (plain Markdown notes) and automate via obsidian-cli.
Use when you need to control Slack from OpenClaw via the slack tool, including reacting to messages or pinning/unpinning items in Slack channels or DMs.
Manage Apple Reminders via remindctl CLI (list, add, edit, complete, delete). Supports lists, date filters, and JSON/plain output.
Manage Trello boards, lists, and cards via the Trello REST API.
Category:productivity