Challenge
Stress-test a finding against the choices you did not make.
Install
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill challenge -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow1.7k
- Category
- Testing
- Updated
- 1mo ago
- License
- MIT
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 1,691 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Stress-test a finding against the choices you did not make. Enumerates the discrete forks a competent analyst could have taken (measure definition, sample filter, control set, clustering level, weighting, functional form), runs the specification grid, and reports the distribution rather than a point estimate, then attacks the identifying assumption with named, computable sensitivity statistics. Use when the user says "is this robust", "challenge this result", "specification curve", "multiverse", "how sensitive is this", "what if I'd used a different measure", "stress-test my estimate", or before a result becomes a headline claim. NOT a reviewer of prose or code, it challenges the CLAIM.
Challenge, does the result survive the choices you didn't make?
A single specification is one draw from a distribution you never looked at.
Why this exists, measured rather than asserted. In a controlled study, 150 autonomous agents were given the same data and the same questions. Effect-size interquartile ranges reached ~10.7 %/yr, and the spread concentrated in discrete measure-choice forks, not in estimation noise. Within a measure family, agents agreed to ~0.25 %/yr. Two findings from that study shape this skill:
- AI peer review left the spread essentially unchanged. Review catches errors; it does not reduce analytical-choice variance. A clean referee report is not robustness.
- Exposure to exemplar papers collapsed the spread by 80, 99 %, convergence by imitation, not by correctness. Herding is not agreement.
So the spread has to be measured, not reviewed away.
Preconditions
- A working baseline specification that runs and produces the headline estimate.
- The estimate's estimand stated in words, "the ATT for units treated in 2015, over 2013, 2019, on the treated population". If you cannot state it, stop: you cannot challenge a claim you have not defined.
- A fork budget (
--forks, default 64). Grid size is the product of your choices; it grows faster than intuition.
Step 1, Enumerate the forks, before running anything
List every point where a competent, honest analyst could have chosen differently. Do this before seeing any alternative result, and write it down, the list is the pre-registration of the challenge.
