What can go wrong, and which skill catches it.
Every skill in Deliberate exists to counter something concrete. This page is the reverse index: start from a failure mode you recognize, jump to the skill that addresses it.
33 modes · 10 categories · most drawn from Karpathy's thread.
Thinking
4 modesSilent Assumption
Agent makes a wrong assumption on your behalf and runs with it without surfacing or checking.
Countered by /deliberate →Hidden Confusion
Agent is confused but masks it with confident-sounding output instead of asking.
Countered by /deliberate →Sycophancy
"Great idea!" replacing "here are the problems with this idea." Agreement that's wrong is worse than disagreement that's right.
Countered by /deliberate →Jump Straight to Code
Multi-step task executed without a plan, leading to rework when the approach was wrong.
Countered by /deliberate →Writing
4 modesOvercomplication
1000 lines where 100 would do. Abstractions for a single caller. Frameworks in place of functions.
Countered by /deliberate →Scope Creep
Orthogonal edits smuggled into a diff. "While I was in there" changes that weren't asked for.
Countered by /deliberate →Orphaned Code
Dead imports, unused helpers, commented-out blocks left behind by a change.
Countered by /deliberate →Premature Abstraction
Strategy pattern for a single type. Parameterizing what only ever has one value.
Countered by /architect →Execution
3 modesRunaway Loop
Thirty minutes of the same failed approach, with increasingly elaborate workarounds.
Countered by /deliberate →Confidence Without Calibration
Authoritative tone for a guess. No signal of "I've verified this" vs. "I'm pattern-matching."
Countered by /deliberate →Context Drift
Decisions from earlier in the session silently reversed 100 messages later.
Countered by /deliberate →Product
3 modesSpec Invention
Reverse-engineering product intent from code, then building on those guesses.
Countered by /spec →Silent Requirement Fill
PRD is vague, agent picks an interpretation without flagging, ships the wrong feature.
Countered by /spec →Spec-Code Drift
Implementation quietly diverges from the PRD. Neither gets updated to match.
Countered by /spec →Architecture
3 modesBoundary Blur
Business logic in the controller. Utils that know about both the UI and the database.
Countered by /architect →Silent Contract Break
API or schema changed without considering unknown callers. Migration plan = none.
Countered by /architect →Ambiguous State Ownership
Mutable state with no clear owner and no single source of truth.
Countered by /architect →Testing
4 modesTautological Test
Test that mirrors the implementation. Refactor that preserves behavior breaks the test.
Countered by /test →Flaky Test
Intermittent failure tolerated via retry-until-green instead of fixed.
Countered by /test →Migration
3 modesBig-Bang Migration
All callers updated in one PR. Can't deploy incrementally. Can't roll back.
Countered by /migrate →Half-Finished Migration
Old path and new path coexist forever. Two sources of truth. No trigger to finish.
Countered by /migrate →Debugging
3 modesSymptom Masking
try/catch to swallow an unexplained error. Null check without knowing why it was null.
Countered by /debug →Random-Walk Debugging
Change something, run, repeat. No hypothesis, no bisection, no explanation when it works.
Countered by /debug →Fix the Instance, Not the Class
Same bug in three places, patched once, mentioned nowhere.
Countered by /debug →Review
3 modesRubber-Stamp LGTM
Approval on code the reviewer didn't understand or didn't read.
Countered by /review →Nit-Only Review
Forty comments on formatting, zero on correctness or architecture.
Countered by /review →Missing Test Ignored
New code path ships with no test. Reviewer doesn't notice absence.
Countered by /review →Incident
3 modesShotgun Fix
Five changes in one minute under pressure. Can't tell which one fixed it (or caused the next incident).
Countered by /incident →Lost Evidence
Stabilization destroys the logs/state needed for root cause. No postmortem possible.
Countered by /incident →Vague Postmortem
"We'll add better monitoring" with no owner, no deadline, no mechanism. Action items that rot.
Countered by /incident →