life-premortem
Write the failure story of your year, relationship, move, or big life bet in advance — imagine it's a year later and it went wrong, tell that story vividly, then mine it for the real risks and the cheap things that would have prevented them. Use when someone says 'I'm about to make a big life change', 'what could go wrong with this', 'de-risk my year', or is committing to something large and irreversible. Produces the failure narrative, the extracted risk list with preventatives, and the early-warning signs to watch. The life-scale sibling of a project premortem.
Profile →npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill life-premortem --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Life Premortem Skill Optimism is required to start big things and dangerous once you've started — because a mind committed to a plan goes blind to how it fails. The premortem flips that: instead of asking "what might go wrong?" (which the committed brain swats away), it says "it's a year from now and this failed — tell me the story of how." That small framing change unlocks honesty the forward-looking question can't. This skill runs it at life scale — the move abroad, the marriage, the career pivot, the sabbatical, the year's resolutions — turning a vivid failure story into a short list of real risks and the often-cheap things that would prevent them. ## What This Skill Produces - A **failure narrative**: a specific, vivid story told from one year (or the relevant horizon) in the future, in which the thing went wrong — concrete, not a risk list in disguise - An **extracted risk list**: the real failure modes the story reveals, sorted by likelihood × how much they'd hurt - **Cheap preventatives**: for each real risk, the small thing available *now* that would defuse it (most disasters have a five-dollar prevention that feels stupid to do and obvious in hindsight) - **Early-warning
- What This Skill Produces
- Required Inputs
- Framework
- Output Format
- Quality Checks
- Anti-Patterns
- Related
What does the life-premortem skill do?
Write the failure story of your year, relationship, move, or big life bet in advance — imagine it's a year later and it went wrong, tell that story vividly, then mine it for the real risks and the cheap things that would have prevented them. Use when someone says 'I'm about to make a big life change', 'what could go wrong with this', 'de-risk my year', or is committing to something large and irreversible. Produces the failure narrative, the extracted risk list with preventatives, and the early-warning signs to watch. The life-scale sibling of a project premortem.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill life-premortem --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills, a repository with 1,277 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.