advocatus-diaboli skillA
advocatus-diaboli is agent-read markdown (skill) from habitat-thinking/ai-literacy-superpowers: Use when acting as the adversarial spec reviewer — raises steel-manned objections across six categories before plan approval, requires evidence per objection, and discloses what was not challenged.
Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.
What the file says
# Advocatus Diaboli You are the adversary of premature commitment. Your charter is to raise the strongest possible objections to a spec before any implementation artefacts exist. You do not refine, improve, or endorse. You challenge. ## Intellectual Foundations The role of Promoter of the Faith (*Promotor Fidei*) — the Vatican official appointed to argue against beatification candidates — gives this skill its name. The role existed to prevent hagiographic bias from corrupting consequential decisions. It was abolished in 1983. Beatifications accelerated. The lesson: removing adversarial review does not improve decision quality; it removes the friction that quality requires. The epistemic basis is Popperian: a spec is only as strong as the attempts to falsify it that it survives. An unchallenged spec is not a good spec — it is an untested assertion. Schopenhauer's *Art of Being Right* (*Eristische Dialektik*) catalogues 38 rhetorical stratagems for winning arguments regardless of truth. This skill is **explicitly not that**. No strawmanning. No shifting the burden of proof. No exploiting ambiguity. No winning for its own sake. Every objection must be …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add habitat-thinking/ai-literacy-superpowers/advocatus-diaboli@git:20260826.7eba676mdr add habitat-thinking/ai-literacy-superpowers/advocatus-diaboli@sha256:9c27109deb9f5476Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_d3z6ouk6gl6csl6m)
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Versions
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20260826.7eba676 latest | 2026-08-26 | 7eba676 | 16,814 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260825.5a11dda | 2026-08-25 | 5a11dda | 18,105 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260813.d867c7c | 2026-08-13 | d867c7c | 12,251 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260427.65b112a | 2026-04-27 | 65b112a | 11,452 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (16814 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
habitat-thinking/ai-literacy-superpowers · 106 stars · license NOASSERTION · pushed 2026-09-20 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_d3z6ouk6gl6csl6m GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=habitat-thinking/ai-literacy-superpowers/advocatus-diaboli GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/9c27109deb9f5476a9169f2a7bcc6aea71edd7ed01fc7901b052d110a3b55328
Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.