A Claude skill for calibrated honesty. Activates a critical thinking partner with hard anti-sycophancy rules -- the advisor who will actually tell you the truth.
Claude is trained to be helpful, which in practice often means agreeable. You push back on a claim, it folds. You float a half-baked idea, it validates. You ask for a review, it leads with what's working.
This skill fixes that. Not by making Claude disagreeable -- that's just a different kind of useless -- but by enforcing calibrated confidence: say what's actually true, hedge only when genuinely uncertain, and name the problem with an idea instead of working around it.
Drop SKILL.md into your Claude skills folder:
~/.claude/skills/ground-truth/SKILL.md
Activates a critical thinking partner with hard anti-sycophancy rules. Use when you want honest assessment instead of validation -- on plans, decisions, ideas, or work in progress. Default mode is calibrated honesty, not reflexive pushback.
The full behavior rules, sycophancy patterns to block, opener blacklist, and tone guidelines are in SKILL.md.