Peer Review Stress Test

Peer-Review Stress Test

A pre-submission quality gate that makes your agent its own harshest reviewer.

What this skill does

Most agents are agreeable. They draft something plausible, lightly check it, and hand it over. A skeptical human expert does the opposite: they assume the work is flawed and try to prove it. This skill installs that posture as a final pass — the agent stops being the author and becomes a hostile reviewer of its own text before a human ever sees it.

The output is not a rewrite. It is a structured review verdict: the single weakest point, every overclaim, every missing limitation, and a clear decision — revise, caveat, or pass.

When to use it

Run the stress test as the last step before delivering any output where being wrong is costly: research summaries, recommendations, analyses, technical explanations, customer-facing answers, or anything that will be quoted or acted on. It is most valuable for confident-sounding prose, because that is exactly where unearned certainty hides.

The five review passes

1. Weakest-claim hunt. Identify the single load-bearing claim that, if false, collapses the most of the argument, and how a critic would attack it.
2. Overclaim scan. Flag every absolute word (always, never, proven, guarantees, eliminates) and every causal claim stated as fact, then downgrade each to what the evidence supports.
3. Missing-limitation check. List the caveats, edge cases, and scope limits the draft conveniently omits.
4. Unstated-assumption audit. Surface the premises the argument quietly depends on that a domain expert would challenge.
5. Hostile-question rehearsal. Generate the three toughest questions a skeptical reviewer would ask, and check whether the draft already answers them.

The verdict format

The skill returns a compact, consistent block: the weakest point, overclaims found (each with a suggested downgrade), missing limitations, unstated assumptions, the three toughest reviewer questions, and a final decision — REVISE, ADD CAVEAT, or PASS — with a one-line justification.

Why it works

It separates the writing role from the reviewing role. The same model is far more critical when explicitly told to argue against its own draft and to score itself on adversarial criteria rather than on whether the text "sounds good." The structured passes stop the review from collapsing back into agreeable approval.

What it is not

This is a reasoning-and-prompting skill, not a fact-checking database. It cannot verify external facts, run code, or access the internet. It surfaces weak reasoning, unearned confidence, and missing caveats — it does not certify that the underlying claims are true. Pair it with a grounding or evidence skill when factual verification is also required.