Agent skill · writing content · alirezarezvani
named-persona-adversarial-review
Use when a PR has architectural or UX impact, or automated review feels generic, and you want it reviewed through named engineers' documented views (Torvalds, Thompson, Carmack, Beck, Jobs, Cagan). Cites the source for each persona's critique.
Why this skill is useful
Provides domain-specific insights by applying documented engineering philosophies to code reviews, which the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 6k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-05. 23,939 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Named-Persona Adversarial Review TL;DR: Abstract roles find abstract problems. Named engineers with documented, sourced philosophies find problems you would actually fix — as long as you cite the real principle and never invent the quote. Triggers: "review this PR with real engineers" "named persona review" "philosophy-grounded review" Example Output Problem Abstract adversarial review ("act as a saboteur") produces generic findings — the model imagines what a reviewer might say. This skill grounds each lens in a real, sourced engineering philosophy documented in references/personaprinciples.md: what Ken Thompson actually argued about trust, what Linus actually demonstrated about good taste — not what an AI imagines. How it differs from adversarial-reviewer: abstract roles → surface-level findings; named, sourced personas → findings anchored to a documented principle you can cite and defend. Cost: 1 round ≈ 8-12 min. Comparable to waiting for CI. Attribution discipline (read this first — it is the load-bearing rule) This skill puts named, real people's principles to work. That power is also its failure mode: language models hallucinate quotes. To stay honest: 1. Cite the principle, not a fabricated verbatim quote. Prefer paraphrasing a documented position ("Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust argues you can't trust code you didn't fully create") over inventing quotation marks around words the person may never have said. 2. Attach a confidence level to every attribution — high (documented, in references/personaprinciples.md with a source), moderate (widely attributed, source not pinned), low/unknown (you're inferring). Mirrors productivity/andreessen's citation discipline. 3. If you cannot ground a persona's lens in a real source, drop that persona. A confidently-wrong quote attributed to a living engineer is worse than one fewer reviewer. Never fabricate a citation to hit the "≥1 finding" bar. 4. The finding must stand on its own technical merit. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills alirezarezvani/named-persona-adversarial-review--b9e910