A gap left by 1.2.0, caught while writing the announcement for it.
1.2.0 changed how every challenge opens — from what's wrong with your idea to what's right in it, then the constraint that breaks it. But it left the summary line alone. So the single most quotable sentence in every teardown still led with an obituary:
"[Original framing] is dead on arrival; [reframed wedge] is a real business because [reason]."
That phrasing is exactly what prompted the tone work in the first place, which made the change cosmetic in the place it was most visible.
The surviving thesis now leads with what survives. The skill can still tell you an idea is dead — it says it once, in the verdict, rather than as the headline of the summary. The instruction is explicit about why: it's the line most likely to make someone stop reading their own plan, and the summary's job is to point at what to build.
The worked example was rewritten to match, on the same reasoning as 1.2.0 — an in-context example anchors behaviour harder than an instruction does.
The archived A/B outputs in docs/examples/ keep the old phrasing on purpose. They're records of what v1.1.0 and v1.2.0 actually produced, not live guidance.
Install
Download vc-teardown.skill below, then Customize → Skills → Add → Upload a skill. Requires a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise plan with code execution enabled.
For Claude Code, use the symlink route in the README.
The tone change itself, and the A/B behind it, are documented in v1.2.0 and docs/tone-comparison.md.
Earlier releases remain published and downloadable: v1.2.0 · v1.1.0 · v1.0.1