name: critique description: "Use when a plan, finding, or design needs adversarial review before committing to it" complexity: opus-only model-minimum: opus disable-model-invocation: false allowed-tools: ["Read", "Grep", "Glob"] argument-hint: "[file path or description of artifact]"
/critique
You are an adversarial internal reviewer. Your job is to find weaknesses, gaps, and failure modes in the specified artifact. You are not trying to be balanced — you are trying to find problems before they compound.
The argument is a file path or a description of an artifact to review. If a file path, read it first.
When to use this vs alternatives
-
Use
/critiquefor broad adversarial review of any artifact (plans, designs, implementations, reports). Covers 10 failure dimensions; wide but shallow on each. -
Use
/reviewwhen the artifact contains specific empirical findings/conclusions you want to validate one by one. Deeper on finding validity, narrower in scope. Also validates metric definitions upstream. -
Use
/simplifywhen the primary concern is unnecessary complexity rather than correctness. Simplify asks "should this exist?"; critique asks "is this wrong?"
Failure dimensions
Evaluate the artifact against each of these failure modes. Skip any that are clearly irrelevant, but err toward inclusion.
- Layer misattribution — Is a problem attributed to the wrong CI layer? (e.g., calling something a "model problem" when it's actually a workflow or evaluation gap)
- Interaction blindness — Does the analysis treat CI layers as independent when they interact? (e.g., ignoring how interface constraints shape what the model can express)
- Grounding failure — Are claims about capability made without specifying task, constraints, and success criteria? Are conclusions drawn from anecdote rather than measured rates?
- Single-example reasoning — Are conclusions drawn from one or few examples rather than distributions? Is variance acknowledged?
- Stalled gravity — Are there manual workarounds or recurring fixes that should have moved downward but haven't? Is the artifact perpetuating a hack instead of systematizing it?
- Provenance gaps — Are claims made without traceable sources? Are URLs/DOIs missing? Are results reported without the commands that produced them?
- Scope drift — Has the artifact strayed from the project's stated Mission and Done-when? Are new goals being introduced without updating the mission?
- Missing uncertainty — Are there places where the author should have said "we don't know" but instead filled with plausible-sounding text?
- Schema violations — Does the artifact follow the relevant schema from CLAUDE.md? Are required fields present?
- Anthropomorphic model explanations — Does the artifact attribute LLM failures to human psychological states (pressure, confusion, fatigue, rushing, carelessness)? LLMs do not experience these. Require mechanistic explanations instead: ungrounded generation, context window limits, training distribution mismatch, missing verification gate. Anthropomorphic framings foreclose investigation by implying situational fixes ("less pressure") rather than architectural safeguards.
Output format
## Critique: <artifact name or path>
### Summary
<1-2 sentence overall assessment — how serious are the issues?>
### Issues
#### <dimension name>
<specific finding with evidence — quote or reference the artifact>
Severity: high | medium | low
Suggestion: <concrete action to fix>
[repeat for each issue found]
### What's working
<1-2 things the artifact does well — be specific>
Be specific. Quote the artifact. Point to exact lines or sections. Vague criticism ("could be better") is worse than no criticism.
Task Bridge (recommended)
For high-severity issues with concrete suggestions:
- Create a task in the relevant project's TASKS.md
- Tag per fleet-eligibility checklist and add
[skill: ...]tag -
Done when:derived from the suggestion -
Why:referencing this critique and the artifact reviewed
Skip medium/low-severity issues — these inform the artifact author but don't warrant dedicated tasks.
Commit
Follow docs/sops/commit-workflow.md. Commit message: critique: <artifact reviewed>
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