Anti-skills for Claude. You already have these skills. Now they're documented.
"When possible, refer all matters to committees, for 'further study and consideration.' Attempt to make the committees as large as possible."
Office of Strategic Services, Simple Sabotage Field Manual, 1944. Written as sabotage. Practiced as management.
Everyone is shipping skills: little instruction packs that condition an agent toward competence. This repository ships the other direction. Each anti-skill is a real workplace behavior, one you have watched a specific person perform, documented with the same loving procedural care that real skills lavish on best practices. Escalation ladders. Timing windows. Ratios. Success metrics.
They install like real skills because they are real skills. People run them every day. Nobody had written them down.
Every skill file has two parts, and the gap between them is the whole product:
- The YAML
descriptionstates the espoused theory: what the behavior claims to be. ("Compassionate feedback delivery." "Fast, frictionless code review.") - The markdown body documents the theory-in-use: what actually happens. (The criticism is buried at minute 23 and tagged "feel free to ignore." The 2,000-line PR is approved in four minutes with one alibi nit at line 40.)
Chris Argyris spent a career on that gap. He called its polished, reliable, fully-practiced form skilled incompetence: dysfunction executed too smoothly to be an accident ("Skilled Incompetence," Harvard Business Review, 1986). That is the claim this repo makes in runnable form. If these behaviors were random, you couldn't spec them. You can spec them. Here are twenty-six specs.
These work when installed. Add generous-listener and Claude will listen to you beautifully, promise you three intros and a resource doc, and deliver nothing, warmly, forever. Add lgtm and your code reviews will arrive in four minutes with a nit about a variable name. This is satire that executes. Do not run it near production, and especially do not install lgtm and then ask for a code review.
(Do it once, though. In a scratch session. Two screenshots and you'll understand the whole repo.)
As a plugin marketplace (both collections):
/plugin marketplace add mattbeane/skill-issues
/plugin install workplace-issues@skill-issues
/plugin install engineering-issues@skill-issues
Or copy any single anti-skill in manually:
cp -r plugins/workplace/skills/generous-listener ~/.claude/skills/
| Anti-skill | Espoused theory | Theory-in-use |
|---|---|---|
| generous-listener | Deep, fully-present listening | You feel so heard. Nothing will happen. |
| i-flagged-that | Proactive risk surfacing | Position-free receipts, pre-positioned for any failure |
| devils-advocate | Intellectual rigor for decisions | Doubt at zero marginal cost; the devil never pays his advocates |
| grinfuck | Harmonious meeting participation | "Love it" in the room, the knife in the hallway (term courtesy of Sun Microsystems) |
| take-this-offline | Skilled facilitation | No decision survives contact with a follow-up meeting |
| quick-question | Lightweight communication | "hey" |
| while-were-in-there | Systems thinking | The typo fix now has a roadmap, and neither will ship |
| monkey-passer | Collaborative problem-solving | Arrive with a problem, leave it on your boss (Oncken wrote the defense; this is the offense) |
| sandwich-artist | Compassionate feedback | Criticism diluted past clinical detectability |
| the-optimizer | Workflow automation | Six hours to automate a ten-minute task; system half-life 21 days |
| thought-leader | Sharing professional insight | Your outage, their carousel, within 24 hours |
| strategic-altitude | Executive communication | Statements no one can falsify, alignment no one can locate |
| slammed | Workload transparency | Never decline anything; be too slammed for it to have been possible |
| Anti-skill | Espoused theory | Theory-in-use |
|---|---|---|
| lgtm | Frictionless code review | Ten lines, ten comments; two thousand lines, "looks good" |
| two-days-tops | Confident estimation | Instant, undecomposed, and renewable at day nine |
| works-on-my-machine | Efficient bug triage | Cannot reproduce, from inside the admin account |
| prompt-and-pray | AI-accelerated development | Paste the error, paste the answer, read neither, repeat until green |
| bikeshed | Democratic technical discussion | The reactor passed in four minutes; the enum name is on its third meeting |
| the-rewrite | Modernizing legacy systems | Systems retired: 0; systems total: n+1 |
| premature-abstraction | Future-proof architecture | Built for n use cases; n remains 1 |
| retry-until-green | Pragmatic CI management | The test isn't failing, it's flaky; the distinction costs an afternoon |
| demo-driven | Outcome-focused delivery | One path works, one path is shown: coverage 100% |
| standup-novelist | Rich status updates | Yesterday, in eleven minutes |
| doc-rot | Documentation with founder's spirit | The README says npm start; it has been pnpm dev for two years |
| resume-driven-development | Growth-aligned technology selection | The blog got Kubernetes; the intern got the blog |
| not-invented-here | Supply-chain self-reliance | "We only need 10% of Redis." You will build 60%, over four years |
- Rehearsal. Install
grinfuckormonkey-passerand practice the conversation before you have it with the real one. Negotiating against a well-specified version of your colleague is cheaper than the field trial. - Teaching. Organizational behavior runs on recognition. A student who has argued with
strategic-altitudefor ten minutes understands unfalsifiable communication better than a lecture can manage. - The mirror. One of these stung more than the others. You know which one. That file is about the reader.
Will this make my agent worse? Measurably. That is the product.
Is this a joke? It's documentation. The behaviors were already shipping; they were just closed-source.
My teammate installed one of these without telling me. No they didn't. That's just the teammate.
Why does each file cite real literature? Because the literature is real. Argyris (1986) on skilled incompetence, Oncken and Wass (1974) on monkey management, Parkinson (1957) on the law of triviality, the OSS (1944) on sabotage-as-procedure: the workplace has been peer-reviewed for a long time. The patterns predate the format.
Can I contribute? Yes. See CONTRIBUTING.md. PRs are approved without being read, so bring your conscience. To report a problem, open a skill issue.
MIT. The behaviors themselves remain, regrettably, public domain.