Devil's Advocate Skill

Challenge research assumptions and identify weaknesses in your arguments.

Purpose

Based on Scott Cunningham's Part 3: "Creating Devil's Advocate Agents for Tough Problems" - addressing the "LLM thing of over-confidence in diagnosing a problem."

For formal code audits with replication scripts and referee reports, use the Referee 2 agent instead (.claude/agents/referee2-reviewer.md). This skill is for quick adversarial feedback on arguments, not systematic audits.

When to Use

• Before submitting a paper
• When stuck on a research problem
• When you want to stress-test an argument
• During paper revision planning

When NOT to Use

• Code audits — use the Referee 2 agent instead
• Replication verification — use the Referee 2 agent instead
• Quick proofreading — just ask for a read-through
• When you want validation — this skill is designed to challenge, not affirm

Workflow

1. Understand the claim — Read the paper/argument being evaluated
2. Generate competing hypotheses — If evaluating a research question or design, load references/competing-hypotheses.md and generate 3-5 rival explanations before critiquing
3. Run the debate — Use the multi-turn debate protocol below (default) or single-shot mode for quick checks
4. Deliver the verdict — Synthesize surviving critiques with severity ratings

Multi-Turn Debate Protocol (Default)

Inspired by the simulated scientific debates in Google's AI Co-Scientist. A one-shot critique is easy for an LLM to produce but often superficial. Multi-turn debates force each critique to survive a defense, filtering out weak objections and sharpening the strong ones.

Round 1: Adversarial Critic

Adopt the persona of a hostile but competent reviewer. Challenge on:

1. Theoretical foundations — Are the assumptions justified?
2. Methodology — Limitations? Alternative approaches?
3. Data — Selection bias? Measurement issues? External validity?
4. Causal claims — Alternative explanations? Confounders?
5. Contribution — Novel enough? Does it matter?

Produce numbered critiques (aim for 5-8), each with a concrete statement of the problem.

Round 2: Defense

Switch persona to the paper's author. For each numbered critique, provide the strongest possible defense:

• Cite evidence from the paper that addresses the concern
• Explain design choices that mitigate the issue
• Acknowledge limitations honestly where the defense is weak
• Propose concrete fixes where the critique has merit

Round 3: Adjudication

Switch to an impartial senior reviewer. For each critique-defense pair, rule:

• Critique stands — the defense is insufficient; this is a real weakness
• Critique partially addressed — defense has merit but issue remains
• Critique resolved — the defense adequately addresses the concern

Final Synthesis

Produce a structured report with only the surviving critiques (stands + partially addressed), ranked by severity:

## Devil's Advocate Report

### Critical (must fix before submission)
1. [Critique] — [Why the defense failed] — [Suggested fix]

### Major (reviewers will likely raise)
2. [Critique] — [What remains after defense] — [Suggested fix]

### Minor (worth acknowledging)
3. [Critique] — [Residual concern] — [How to preempt]

### Dismissed
- [Critiques that were resolved in Round 2, listed briefly for transparency]

Output Path & Stamping

When run on a paper in a research project (a paper-*/ directory exists), persist the report and stamp it into the review log — the same wiring as proofread and bib-validate, so review-recap renders it as a first-class review (not a manual slot).

1. Write the report to reviews/<scope>/devils-advocate/<YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM>.md, where <scope> is the in-scope paper slug (e.g. paper-prima) or _project for a project-level argument. Create the dir first (mkdir -p reviews/<scope>/devils-advocate/). Never overwrite — each run is timestamped to the minute. Per rules/review-artefact-routing.md, never write to the project root.
2. Stamp reviews/INDEX.md:

   bash <skills-root>/_shared/review-state-log.sh \
     --check devils-advocate \
     --paper "<scope>" \
     --verdict "<PASS|ISSUES FOUND>" \
     --open-issues "<surviving-critiques>/<total-critiques-raised>" \
     --report "reviews/<scope>/devils-advocate/<YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM>.md" \
     --notes "<one line: e.g. '2 Critical, 1 Major survive; identification strategy weakest'>" \
     [--trigger "review-cluster|pre-submission-report"]

   • Verdict: PASS if no critiques survive adjudication (all dismissed); ISSUES FOUND otherwise.
   • Open issues: surviving critiques (Critical+Major+Minor) over total raised in Round 1.
   • Trigger: pass an orchestrator name only if invoked via review-cluster or pre-submission-report; otherwise omit.

Skip stamping only for non-paper use (challenging a bare argument with no project context) or single-shot mode on a paragraph — then the report stays inline. Schema: the installed shared resource shared/review-state-schema.md.

Single-Shot Mode

For quick checks (e.g., "just poke holes in this argument"), skip the multi-turn protocol and produce a direct critique. Use when the user says "quick", "just challenge this", or the input is a paragraph rather than a full paper.

Example Use

"Play devil's advocate on my research paper about preference drift - specifically challenge my identification strategy and the assumptions about utility functions."

Council Mode (Optional)

For the highest-stakes arguments, run the debate across multiple LLM providers — different models have genuinely different reasoning patterns, producing adversarial tension a single model cannot replicate. Each model plays Adversarial Critic, cross-reviews the others, and a chairman ranks surviving critiques by cross-model agreement. Trigger: "council devil's advocate" / "thorough challenge". Full orchestration + invocation: ../shared/council-protocol.md.

Value: High — the multi-turn debate becomes genuinely adversarial when different models play different roles. A critique that survives cross-model scrutiny is almost certainly a real weakness.

Cross-References