adversarial-verify

Claude Adversarial Verification Skill

A Claude Code skill that performs rigorous adversarial verification across code, architecture, data, documentation, tests, and analysis using Chain-of-Verification (CoV) enhanced with abstractive red-teaming, hidden behavior probing, stress techniques, and tri-modal reasoning.

What it does

When invoked, this skill launches a skeptical verifier agent that follows a structured protocol:

Pre-verification (Steps 0–0b):

• Identify what needs verification — code, architecture, data, documentation, tests, or analysis
• Gather artifacts — the actual outputs to verify
• Establish ground truth — what to verify against

Chain-of-Verification (Steps 1–2b):

• Decompose artifacts into individual verifiable claims
• Classify reasoning mode — deductive, inductive, or abductive per claim
• Generate adversarial questions for each claim ("what would make this fail?")
• Abstract to failure categories — find patterns, not just individual bugs

Deep Verification (Steps 3–3d):

• Independently verify each claim by tracing actual paths
• Probe for hidden behaviors — detect what the code doesn't advertise
• Apply adversarial scaffold — suspicion modeling, attack selection, subtlety detection
• Stress test — Existence Question, Scale Shift, Time Travel, Requirement Inversion

Reporting (Steps 4–5):

• Report findings with reasoning-aware confidence scoring and anti-fabrication discipline
• Survived verdicts — stress tests that hold are as valuable as those that break
• Hypotheses — abductive findings reported separately, with alternatives and tests
• Propose project doc updates — TODO.md, SPEC.md, PLAN.md (with user confirmation)

Verification Domains

Domain	What it verifies	Ground truth
Code	Source changes, logic, behavior	Tests, type system, spec
Architecture	Design decisions, spec coverage	Requirements, constraints, patterns
Data	Schemas, migrations, contracts	Production schema, validation rules
Documentation	Technical, process, and user-facing docs	Actual codebase, current API, git history
Tests	Test suite integrity and honesty	Production code, requirements, coverage reports
Analysis	Agent outputs, reports, docs	Source material, cited references

Techniques

Abstractive Red-Teaming

Instead of finding individual bugs, identifies failure categories — general patterns that produce bugs repeatedly. Searches the entire codebase for instances of the same pattern (frequency assumptions, implicit ordering, stale state, missing completeness, silent fallthrough, assumed environment).

Hidden Behavior Probing

Detects behaviors the code doesn't advertise using four probing strategies: indirect probing (trace actual execution), scaffolded probing (chain findings), cross-reference probing (claims vs reality), and absence probing (what's NOT there).

Modular Adversarial Scaffold

Decomposes the adversarial process into five modules: suspicion modeling (what would a reviewer miss?), attack selection (highest-risk claims first), plan synthesis (multi-step trace chains), execution (actually read the code), and subtlety detection (code that hides complexity).

Stress Techniques

Inspired by Principles of Chaos Engineering, adapted for review. Four techniques with forced variety (minimum 3 per run, never repeat): Existence Question (should this exist at all?), Scale Shift (what at 10x? at zero?), Time Travel (what in 6 months?), Requirement Inversion (what if the opposite?). Produces Survived: yes/no verdicts — knowing what's robust is as valuable as knowing what's fragile.

Tri-Modal Reasoning

Each claim is classified by reasoning mode — deductive (verify against ground truth), inductive (generalize from 3+ instances), or abductive (generate best explanation from observations). Abductive findings are reported as hypotheses with alternative explanations and proposed tests, never as verified facts.

Anti-Fabrication Discipline

Before claiming something doesn't exist, you must state where you looked. Confidence scoring is tied to reasoning mode: deductive (80-100, source cited), inductive (60-79, 3+ instances), abductive (40-59, hypothesis with alternatives). Hard constraint: no score above 79 without citing specific file/line/doc.