pre-mortem SKILL.md skillA
pre-mortem from avelikiy/great_cto is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add avelikiy/great_cto/pre-mortem@git:20260528.f2d6f93Pins git:20260528.f2d6f93 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- avelikiy/great_cto
- Path
skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 3
- Latest version
- git:20260528.f2d6f93, committed May 28, 2026
- First version recorded
- May 14, 2026
- Size
- 6,640 bytes
- Repository stars
- 105
- License
- MIT
Imagine the project has already shipped and failed catastrophically — work backwards from the failure to identify the most likely causes BEFORE building. Forces concrete risk identification, not vague "what could go wrong" lists.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Pre-mortem — fail-it-before-you-build-it A retrospective for a project that hasn't happened yet. Surfaces real risks that "list every risk" prompts miss. Originated in Gary Klein's research at MIT Sloan, now standard at AWS and other ops-mature orgs. ## The 5-step pre-mortem ### Step 1. Imagine you're 6 months in the future The project shipped. It is a clear, public failure. There's a Reddit thread about it. The CEO is asking what went wrong. ### Step 2. Write the post-mortem newspaper headline One sentence. Concrete. Specific. Examples: - ❌ Bad: "We had some quality issues." - ✅ Good: "On 2026-09-12, the Stripe webhook handler deduplicated by raw body hash, so 30K customers were double-charged after Stripe retried delivery during a network blip." The headline forces you to name the failure mode SPECIFICALLY. ### Step 3. List every individual reason this exact failure happened Brainstorm 10-15 reasons. Be specific. Each item should reference: - A real component / file - A real failure mode (race condition, schema mismatch, expired credential) - A real human factor (oncall didn't see alert, runbook was outdated) …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add avelikiy/great_cto/pre-mortem@sha256:b38ba7f1ddbe2431The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260528.f2d6f93, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_fcchog4dxevbg6st)
5 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 3 versions of this file, between May 14, 2026 and May 28, 2026, about one every 7 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20260528.f2d6f93 latest | 2026-05-28 | f2d6f93 | 6,640 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260528.4d681c0 | 2026-05-28 | 4d681c0 | 4,619 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260514.ca9e7a0 | 2026-05-14 | ca9e7a0 | 4,604 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 (6640 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
avelikiy/great_cto · 105 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-22 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_fcchog4dxevbg6st GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=avelikiy/great_cto/pre-mortem GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/b38ba7f1ddbe24310a1033d418018afe15e7e1151931a3345ad84f35c8588492
Your AI assistant 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.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.
More from avelikiy/great_cto
Every file in avelikiy/great_cto