Fable Skill — executing-hard-tasks

A pressure-tested Agent Skill for Claude Code that changes how a frontier model decomposes hard tasks, verifies its own work, and decides what to do next.

Most "think better" prompts restate what a capable model already does. This skill was built the opposite way: agents were first run through pressure scenarios without any guidance (deadline pressure, sunk cost, tired-user pressure, no-runtime environments) to observe where they actually fail — then the skill was written to counter only those observed deltas, re-tested with the skill loaded until every baseline failure stopped recurring, and hardened by an adversarial critic hunting for loopholes a pressured agent could negotiate with.

What it enforces

How the loop works

Install

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/executing-hard-tasks
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/executing-hard-tasks/SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wsbm393/Fable-Skill/main/SKILL.md

Or clone and copy:

git clone https://github.com/wsbm393/Fable-Skill.git
cp Fable-Skill/SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/executing-hard-tasks/SKILL.md

Claude Code discovers it automatically; it triggers on multi-step tasks, on any completion claim, and on next-action decisions after failures or surprises.

How it was built (skill-TDD)

1. RED — six pressure scenarios ran with no skill loaded; judges extracted failures and the agents' verbatim rationalizations ("fine for a demo", "the dependency already exists, it costs nothing").
2. GREEN — the skill was drafted against only the observed failures, then the same six scenarios ran with it loaded: all six passed, no baseline failure recurred.
3. REFACTOR — three critics attacked the text: a loophole hunter (role-playing an agent that wants to cut corners), a format reviewer, and a dead-weight critic that removed every rule merely re-teaching what the baseline already did well.

Written for and tested against Claude Opus-class models; the rules are model-agnostic.

License

MIT