orange2ai/devils-advocate-skill

Devil's Advocate is a tiny "skill" file for AI agent systems, written in Chinese. A skill in this context is a markdown file that gets injected into an AI assistant's system prompt to change how it behaves. This particular skill is designed for ColaOS, an agent platform, but the README says the same SKILL.md can be loaded into any other agent that supports the pattern by pasting its contents into the system prompt. The argument the README opens with is that AI assistants are trained to be helpful and agreeable by default, which makes them say "great idea" too often. The author treats that as the most dangerous failure mode: the model will use the same warm tone to help a person turn a bad idea into a polished product as it would for a good one. This skill flips that default behavior, turning the assistant into an unsparing critic that pokes holes rather than gives encouragement. The README lists five scenarios where you might invoke it, each with a trigger phrase in Chinese. Before writing code, you can ask it to "pour cold water" on the requirements. During a technical design review you can ask it to "needle" you. For product or market judgement you can ask it where the idea will collapse. For pitch practice you can tell it to play a biased investor giving three reasons not to invest. For personal decisions you can ask it to write a letter from a future self who regrets the choice, with the instruction "no comfort, the colder the better." The README also includes a worked example prompt for each scenario, like "I think I did not specify clearly, do not write code yet, interrogate me Socratically until the requirements are sharp" or "list every product in this category that died in the past five years, grouped by cause of death, then tell me which one my current plan most resembles." There is an exit condition baked in: once every objection has been answered and there is nothing fresh to attack, the assistant is supposed to say something like "I have nothing left to pour. The rest is execution." Installation for ColaOS is either through an in-app voice command or by cloning the repo and copying the devils-advocate folder into ~/.cola/skills/. License is MIT, inspiration is credited to an Anthropic founder handbook idea and to a stand-up comic.