Pre-Mortem Analysis

Pre-Mortem Analysis is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by tjboudreaux in cc-thinking-skills.

969 stars133 forkson tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skillsAdded 2026/08/21+1% in starsRepository updated 2026/08/07

agent-skillsai-toolsanthropicclaudeclaude-codecritical-thinkingdecision-makingfirst-principlesmental-modelsproblem-solvingsystems-thinking

Install in seconds

Install Pre-Mortem Analysis

Copy Pre-Mortem Analysis into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/tree/main/skills/thinking-pre-mortem ~/.claude/skills/thinking-pre-mortem

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/thinking-pre-mortem/SKILL.md in tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/thinking-pre-mortem
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 2451 skills

What Pre-Mortem Analysis does

Pre-Mortem Analysis assumes a plan has already failed and works backward to identify concrete causes. Use it before kickoff, launch, or other high-risk commitments to turn risks into mitigations and verification gates.

Pre-Mortem Analysis is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Pre-Mortem Analysis comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, ai-tools, anthropic, claude and claude-code.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Pre-Mortem Analysis

Core rule: Prospective hindsight beats "what could go wrong?" Assume the plan has already failed (past tense), generate concrete failure paths, reverse them into prevention requirements, and bind each top path to a verifiable plan change.

When to Use

Before kickoff, major technical commitment, high-risk sprint work, launch, or release.
After a plan looks solid but before execution, especially when optimism or overconfidence is likely.
When a decision is costly to reverse and risks are still implicit rather than enforced.

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Pre-Mortem Analysis

What else does tjboudreaux publish alongside Pre-Mortem Analysis?
Pre-Mortem Analysis is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Bounded Rationality, Circle Of Competence and Effectuation. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Pre-Mortem Analysis does, and is maintained by tjboudreaux in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills page.
How does Pre-Mortem Analysis compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Pre-Mortem Analysis ranks #1402 by stars among the 2451 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Pre-Mortem Analysis against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.