Critical Briefs

Agent Skills for Claude AI that validate business ideas, stress-test processes, and design MVPs through skeptical dialogue. Challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and think clearly about reality before you build.

What are Critical Briefs?

Critical Briefs use challenging, skeptical dialogue to create structured documents that help users:

• Validate business ideas by exposing weaknesses and testing assumptions
• Stress-test operational processes to find blind spots and failure points
• Design focused MVPs by ruthlessly cutting scope and challenging complexity
• Think clearly about reality instead of optimistic scenarios

These skills are skeptical by design - they find problems, ask tough questions, demand evidence, and cut ruthlessly. Think of them as experienced mentors who've seen failures and want to prevent them.

Available Skills

🏢 critical-business-brief

Transforms vague business ideas into structured, reality-tested business briefs through critical dialogue. Systematically explores problem, customer, solution, business model, competition, and more. Challenges assumptions and demands evidence.

Use when:

• User presents an unclear or early-stage business idea
• Mentions starting a business or business opportunity
• Needs to validate assumptions about a concept
• Asks to clarify or validate a business opportunity

Output: Structured business brief in .ideas/[idea-name]/business.md

⚙️ critical-process-brief

Maps out and stress-tests operational processes to expose hidden complexity, bottlenecks, and scalability issues. Probes step-by-step flows, edge cases, failure points, and scale scenarios (2x, 10x, 100x).

Use when:

• User wants to map out business processes or operations
• Needs to think through "how this works operationally"
• Questions about delivery, workflows, or process details
• Needs to validate operational feasibility

Output: Detailed process brief in .ideas/[idea-name]/process.md

📱 critical-app-brief

Designs focused MVP applications through ruthless scope-cutting dialogue. Challenges every feature, pushes for simpler tech, and keeps laser focus on building minimum viable product to test core hypotheses.

Use when:

• User wants to turn business ideas and processes into an application
• Mentions "build an app", "MVP", or application design
• Needs help defining what to build and what to cut
• Ready to design application after clarifying business and processes

Output: MVP application brief in .ideas/[idea-name]/app.md

Installation

In Claude Code

1. Register the marketplace:

   /plugin marketplace add Przemocny/critical-briefs
   

2. Install the plugin:

   /plugin install critical-briefs@critical-briefs
   

3. Use the skills by mentioning them in conversation:

   • "I have a business idea..." (triggers critical-business-brief)
   • "How would this work operationally?" (triggers critical-process-brief)
   • "Let's build an MVP for this" (triggers critical-app-brief)

Manual Installation

Clone the repository and copy skills to your local ~/.claude/skills/ directory:

git clone https://github.com/Przemocny/critical-briefs.git
cd critical-briefs
cp -r skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

How It Works

All three skills follow a similar workflow:

1. Initial Understanding - Open questions to understand the concept
2. Critical Exploration - Systematic questioning across key categories
3. Brief Creation - Structured documentation with marked uncertainties
4. Wrap-up - Honest assessment and next steps

Key Principles

• Critical, not supportive - Challenge assumptions, find weaknesses, cut ruthlessly
• Reality over optimism - Point out difficulties and obstacles
• Natural dialogue - Conversational flow, not rigid questionnaire
• Evidence-based - Push for concrete evidence, not assumptions
• Structured output - Map conversations to actionable briefs

Output Format

Skills create structured briefs in .ideas/[idea-name]/:

.ideas/
└── my-business-idea/
    ├── business.md    # Business concept validation (critical-business-brief)
    ├── process.md     # Operational process analysis (critical-process-brief)
    └── app.md         # MVP application design (critical-app-brief)

Each skill includes:

• Reference materials in references/ subdirectory:
  • categories-guide.md - Detailed explanation of each category
  • questions-library.md - Critical questions library
  • red-flags.md - Common warning signs and problems

Each brief includes:

• Detailed exploration of key categories
• Uncertainties marked explicitly
• Red flags identified clearly
• Critical challenges prioritized
• Next steps for validation/action

Philosophy

These skills operate on the principle that finding problems early is a gift. It's better to discover fatal flaws in conversation than after months of work. The skills are designed to be:

• Skeptical - Assume issues exist until proven otherwise
• Direct - Point out contradictions and problems clearly
• Realistic - Provide context from common failures
• Honest - No sugarcoating of serious problems
• Ruthless - Default to cutting scope, challenging complexity, demanding evidence

Contributing

This is a public repository for critical brief skills. Contributions are welcome for:

• Additional critical brief skills (product brief, marketing brief, financial brief, etc.)
• Additional critic skills (code review, architecture review, security review, etc.)
• Improvements to existing skills
• Additional reference materials (questions, red flags, categories)
• Bug fixes and clarifications

License

Apache 2.0 (for skill implementations)

Related

• Anthropic Skills Repository
• Agent Skills Specification
• CampusAI