doubt-driven-development — a second opinion that hasn't seen the first

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Slash command /doubt-driven-development

a second opinion that hasn't seen the first

Before a non-trivial decision stands, it spawns a fresh-context reviewer whose job is to disprove it rather than approve it. Catches the failure where a long session quietly promotes an assumption into a fact nobody re-checked.

advanced ⏱ ~a day per avoided bad merge View source ↗

In practice

Ninety minutes into a session you and Claude agree the reconciliation job can safely run twice on the same batch. Neither of you re-derives it — it was established early and has been treated as settled ever since. A fresh reviewer, given only the claim and none of the reasoning that produced it, asks what happens when the second run lands mid-write. That question never occurs inside the original session, because the original session already believes the answer.

Long sessions have a specific failure mode: something plausible gets said early, nobody challenges it, and forty exchanges later it is load-bearing fact. The session cannot catch this, because the session is the thing that believes it.

This skill materialises a reviewer with fresh context and an explicit bias to disprove, before the decision stands.

How it differs from a code review

A review is a verdict on a finished artifact. This is an in-flight posture — it fires while changing course is still cheap, on decisions rather than diffs.

It triggers on the things you’d expect to matter: production auth, security-sensitive logic, high-stakes migrations, irreversible operations, unfamiliar code.

Why it’s marked advanced

Not because it’s hard to run — it isn’t — but because it costs tokens and wall-clock on every non-trivial decision, and a beginner working on low-stakes tasks will feel that as friction without seeing the payoff. Start with the free version of the same instinct: review in a fresh session and be brutally honest. Graduate to this when you’re shipping something you’d have to explain if it broke.

Worth knowing

• Installing gives you 25 skills. source-driven-development on this page is in the same bundle.
• SSH clone errors on a managed laptop? Use the HTTPS marketplace form: /plugin marketplace add https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills.git.

Access

Public — no access request needed. MIT licensed.

Get this skill running

Copy-paste into Claude Code. The marketplace + install steps run once per machine; the last one is how you call the skill day-to-day.

1. 1 Access

   Public repo — no access request needed.

2. 2 Add the marketplace — once per machine

   /plugin marketplace add addyosmani/agent-skills

3. 3 Install the skill

   /plugin install agent-skills@addy-agent-skills

4. 4 Use it

   /doubt-driven-development

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