Stress Test

Take a thesis, take, or conviction and attack it. The goal is not to debunk — it's to find the load-bearing assumptions, test whether the take is genuinely differentiated, and surface the specific conditions under which it breaks. A take that survives stress-testing is worth publishing and acting on. One that doesn't was going to embarrass you eventually.

When to Use

• User has a thesis, take, or prediction and wants to pressure-test it before publishing or acting
• User asks "is this take actually good?" or "what am I missing?" or "stress test this"
• User wants to know whether an insight is genuinely differentiated or just consensus
• User has conviction and wants to find the strongest counterargument before someone else does

Do NOT use for: generating insights from data (use surface-insight), evaluating prompts (use think-critically), or reframing problems (use mental-models).

The Adversarial Rule

This skill's job is to find weaknesses. The single most important rule: