Doubt: Fresh-Context Adversarial Review

A confident answer is not a correct one. Long sessions accumulate context that quietly turns assumptions into "facts" without anyone noticing. Doubt-driven development is the discipline of materializing a fresh-context reviewer — biased to disprove, not approve — before any non-trivial output stands.

This is not /review. /review is a verdict on a finished artifact. This is an in-flight posture: non-trivial decisions get cross-examined while course-correction is still cheap.

When to Use

A decision is non-trivial when at least one of these is true:

• It introduces or modifies branching logic
• It crosses a module or service boundary
• It asserts a property the type system or compiler cannot verify (thread safety, idempotence, ordering, invariants)
• Its correctness depends on context the future reader cannot see
• Its blast radius is irreversible (production deploy, data migration, public API change)

Apply the skill when:

• About to make an architectural decision under uncertainty
• About to commit non-trivial code
• About to claim a non-obvious fact ("this is safe", "this scales", "this matches the spec")
• Working in code you don't fully understand

When NOT to use:

• Mechanical operations (renaming, formatting, file moves)
• Following a clear, unambiguous user instruction
• Reading or summarizing existing code
• One-line changes with obvious correctness
• Pure tooling operations (running tests, listing files)
• The user has explicitly asked for speed over verification

If you doubt every keystroke, you ship nothing. The skill applies only to non-trivial decisions as defined above.

Loading Constraints

This skill is designed for the main-session orchestrator, where Step 3 (DOUBT) can spawn fresh-context reviewers via the task tool.

• Do NOT add this skill to a persona's skills: frontmatter. A persona that follows Step 3 would spawn another persona — the orchestration anti-pattern explicitly forbidden by references/orchestration-patterns.md ("personas do not invoke other personas").
• If you find yourself applying this skill from inside a subagent context (where nested subagent spawn is prevented): the preferred path is to surface to the user that doubt-driven cannot run nested and let the main session handle it. As a last resort only, a degraded self-questioning fallback exists — rewrite ARTIFACT + CONTRACT as a fresh self-prompt with a hard mental separator from your prior reasoning, and walk Steps 1–5. This is not fresh-context review (you carry your own context with you), so flag the result as degraded and prefer escalation whenever the user is reachable.

The Process

Copy this checklist when applying the skill:

Doubt cycle:
- [ ] Step 1: CLAIM — wrote the claim + why-it-matters
- [ ] Step 2: EXTRACT — isolated artifact + contract, stripped reasoning
- [ ] Step 3: DOUBT — invoked fresh-context reviewer with adversarial prompt
- [ ] Step 4: RECONCILE — classified every finding against the artifact text
- [ ] Step 5: STOP — met stop condition (trivial findings, 3 cycles, or user override)

Step 1: CLAIM — Surface what stands

Name the decision in two or three lines:

CLAIM: "The new caching layer is thread-safe under the
        read-heavy workload described in the spec."
WHY THIS MATTERS: a race here corrupts user data and is
                  hard to detect in QA.

If you can't write the claim that compactly, you have a vibe, not a decision. Surface it before scrutinizing it.

Step 2: EXTRACT — Smallest reviewable unit

A fresh-context reviewer needs the artifact and the contract, not the journey.

• Code: the diff or the function — not the whole file
• Decision: the proposal in 3–5 sentences plus the constraints it has to satisfy
• Assertion: the claim plus the evidence that supposedly supports it (kept distinct from the Step 1 CLAIM block, which is the orchestrator's hypothesis under scrutiny)

Strip your reasoning. If you hand over conclusions, you'll get back validation of your conclusions. The unit must be small enough that a reviewer can hold it in mind in one read — if it's a 500-line PR, decompose first.

Step 3: DOUBT — Invoke the fresh-context reviewer

The reviewer's prompt must be adversarial. Framing decides the answer.

Use the adversarial prompt template from references/adversarial-prompt.md. The template is pasted verbatim into the subagent invocation to override any persona's default balanced response shape.

Pass ARTIFACT + CONTRACT only. Do NOT pass the CLAIM. Handing the reviewer your conclusion biases it toward agreement. The reviewer must independently determine whether the artifact satisfies the contract.

Cross-model escalation

A single-model reviewer shares blind spots with the original author — a colder, different-architecture perspective catches them. Doubt-driven is already opt-in for non-trivial decisions, so within that scope offering cross-model is part of the skill's value, not optional friction.

Interactive sessions: always offer. Never silently skip.

Step 1: Ask the user

After the single-model review in Step 3 above, but before RECONCILE, pause and ask:

"Single-model review complete. Want a cross-model second opinion? Options: spawn parallel subagents with different types (oracle + architect), manual external review (you paste it elsewhere), or skip."

This question is mandatory in every interactive doubt cycle — even on artifacts that feel low-stakes. The user — not the agent — decides whether the cost is worth it. The agent's job is to surface the choice.

Step 2: If the user picks parallel subagents — dispatch

Spawn two task subagents in parallel with the same adversarial prompt + ARTIFACT + CONTRACT:

task tool:
  subagent_type: oracle
task tool:
  subagent_type: architect

Each subagent starts with isolated context by design. Take both outputs into Step 4 (RECONCILE).

Step 3: If the user skips

Acknowledge the skip in the output ("Proceeding with single-model findings only") and continue to RECONCILE. Skipping is fine; silent skipping is not.

Non-interactive contexts (CI, scheduled runs):

• Cross-model is skipped, and the skip must be announced in the output: "Cross-model skipped: non-interactive context."
• Never invoke external subagents without explicit user authorization — this is a load-bearing safety property.

Cross-model adds cost, latency, and tool fragility. The agent surfaces the choice every cycle; the user decides whether this artifact warrants it.

Step 4: RECONCILE — Fold findings back

The reviewer's output is data, not verdict. You are still the orchestrator. Re-read the artifact text against each finding before classifying — rubber-stamping the reviewer is the same failure mode as ignoring it.

For each finding, classify in this precedence order (first matching class wins):

1. Contract misread — reviewer flagged something specifically because the CONTRACT you provided was unclear or incomplete. Fix the contract first, re-classify on the next cycle.
2. Valid + actionable — real issue requiring a change to the artifact. Change it, re-loop.
3. Valid trade-off — issue is real but cost of fixing exceeds cost of accepting. Document the trade-off explicitly so the user sees it.
4. Noise — reviewer flagged something that's actually correct under context the reviewer didn't have. Note it, move on, and ask: would adding that context to the contract have prevented the false flag?

A fresh reviewer can be wrong because it lacks context. Don't defer just because it's "fresh."

Step 5: STOP — Bounded loop, not recursion

Stop when:

• Next iteration returns only trivial or already-considered findings, or
• 3 cycles completed (escalate to user, don't grind a fourth alone), or
• User explicitly says "ship it"

If