npx skills add ...
npx skills add warpdotdev/common-skills --skill cross-critique
Run a second round on a contested question by circulating each subagent's independent proposal to the other authors and asking for structured pros and cons, then synthesize. Use this skill whenever you have multiple independent proposals or opinions on a contested decision — architecture tradeoffs, code review disagreements, design choices, competing root-cause theories — and want sharper analysis than you'd produce by synthesizing alone. Pairs naturally with the council and research skills; reach for it liberally whenever proposals diverge.
npx skills add warpdotdev/common-skills --skill cross-critique
Use this skill to run a second round after several subagents have independently produced proposals or opinions on the same contested question. Instead of synthesizing their reports yourself, you circulate each proposal to the other authors and ask them to critique it — pros and cons — and then you synthesize the richer set of analyses that results.
When you generate independent proposals (different models, different angles), each author ends up with deep context on the question — often deeper than yours, since they did the investigation. If you jump straight to synthesizing their reports alone, you're the bottleneck: you can only see the tradeoffs you happen to notice.
Asking the authors to critique each other is what a good leader does when seeking advice: get a few people with differing perspectives in a room, let them poke holes in each other's reasoning, and you walk away with a far more complete picture than any one of them — or you — would produce alone. The authors will surface failure modes, hidden assumptions, and tradeoffs that neither you nor the original proposer flagged.
Use cross-critique when a decision is contested — i.e. independent agents produced genuinely divergent proposals, or the question is subjective enough that reasonable approaches disagree. Good fits:
Don't bother when the proposals already strongly agree, or when the question has an objective answer you can verify directly — critique adds latency and tokens, and its value comes specifically from resolving genuine disagreement. Within that scope, use it freely; you don't need a high-stakes justification, just real divergence worth resolving.
This skill is the second round. It assumes you already have N independent proposals in hand. If you don't yet:
Critically, the first round must be independent — do not let the authors see each other's work during round one, or you lose the diversity that makes round two valuable.
Collect each author's proposal. Keep them concise — the core recommendation and its reasoning, not the full transcript. Consider labeling them neutrally (Proposal A, B, C) and, where practical, anonymizing authorship to reduce bandwagon bias toward whichever model sounds most confident.
Reuse the same subagents from round one rather than spawning fresh ones — they retain their context and can critique from a position of understanding. Send each author the other proposals (not their own) and ask each for:
Insist on both pros and cons for each alternative. An honest critique that credits a rival's strengths is far more useful than a reflexive defense of one's own proposal.
Now bring it together yourself. Compare critiques by evidence quality, not vote count. In your final answer:
Use this shape unless the task calls for something different: