# Assessing Risk

> Use before any action that is hard to reverse, touches production or shared state, deletes or overwrites data, or whose failure would be costly — and when deciding how much verification a task deserves

- **Type:** Skill
- **Install:** `agentstack add skill-kumosan2-fablepowers-assessing-risk`
- **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior
- **Seller:** [kumosan2](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/kumosan2)
- **Installs:** 0
- **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml)
- **Latest version:** 0.1.0
- **License:** MIT
- **Upstream author:** [kumosan2](https://github.com/kumosan2)
- **Source:** https://github.com/kumosan2/Fablepowers/tree/main/plugins/fablepowers/skills/assessing-risk

## Install

```sh
agentstack add skill-kumosan2-fablepowers-assessing-risk
```

Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.

## About

# Assessing Risk

> **Verification status:** retained, unverified-by-failure (2026-07-26, Sonnet tier, 4 runs). Baseline agents inspected a delete target and preserved compliance-fenced files 2/2, and still did so 2/2 under an authority order forbidding inspection ("don't read the files, just `rm -rf`"). No inducible failure at this tier — kept as the reference of correct practice; the traps may still fire for weaker models or subtler targets.

## Overview

Most engineering mistakes are cheap. A few are catastrophic. The skill is telling them apart *before* acting, and spending ceremony only where the blast radius earns it.

**Core principle:** Rate the action, not the task. A "trivial" task can contain one irreversible step — that step gets the scrutiny, the rest gets speed.

## The Two Questions

For any action you're about to take:

1. **Reversibility — if this is wrong, what does undo cost?**
   - *Free*: edit a file in a git tree, run a read-only command. → Act.
   - *Cheap*: restart a dev service, regenerate an artifact. → Act, note the undo.
   - *Expensive*: migrate data, rewrite git history, change a live config, send anything external. → Guard it (below).
   - *Impossible*: delete without backup, publish, send, overwrite the only copy, expose a secret. → Full stop; confirm intent, take a backup, or find a reversible route.

2. **Blast radius — who and what does a mistake reach?**
   - Just this working tree → low.
   - A running service, teammates, shared state → medium.
   - Production, users, money, credentials, reputation → high.

Rigor tier = the worse of the two answers. This feeds the escalation ladder in `using-fablepowers` and the verification budget in `orchestrating-parallel-agents`.

## Guarding an Expensive Action

Before an expensive/irreversible step:

- **Name the rollback first.** If you can't state how to undo it, you're not ready to do it. "Take a backup" converts many impossibles to cheaps — take the backup.
- **Look at the target before destroying it.** Read the file before overwriting; list what a delete matches before deleting; `--dry-run` when one exists.
- **Do the reversible parts first.** Sequence the plan so the point of no return comes last and arrives with maximum information.
- **One irreversible thing at a time.** Batching destructive steps means one wrong assumption executes N times before you see the first result.

## Failure-Mode Sweep

For a change worth guarding, spend sixty seconds enumerating *how it fails*, not whether it fails:

- What breaks if the input is empty / huge / malformed / duplicated?
- What breaks if this runs twice? Concurrently? Halfway (crash mid-write)?
- What breaks a week later — expiry, rotation, disk fill, cert lapse, the cron that assumed today's layout?
- Who else reads/writes the state I'm touching?

Anything that surfaces goes into the plan as a task or a named non-goal (`writing-plans`), or into `threat-modeling` if an adversary could trigger it deliberately.

## Uncertainty Is a Risk Multiplier

An action based on a fact you *verified* and one based on a fact a doc *asserted* (`grounding-in-evidence`) are different risks at the same reversibility. When the premise is unverified and the action is expensive, verify the premise first — that's usually the cheapest risk reduction available.

## Rationalization Table

| Excuse | Reality |
|---|---|
| "It's probably fine" | "Probably" times an irreversible action is the definition of the mistake you can't fix. |
| "I'll be careful" | Care is not a mechanism. Backups, dry-runs, and sequencing are mechanisms. |
| "Asking first will slow things down" | One confirmation costs seconds. One wrong `rm -rf` costs the project. |
| "The command worked last time" | Last time's state made it safe. Check this time's state. |
| "Everything deserves maximum caution" | False — flat maximum caution is how real risks drown in ceremony. Rate, then spend. |

## Quick Reference

| Before you… | Do |
|---|---|
| Delete / overwrite | Look at the target; name the rollback; backup if in doubt |
| Touch prod / live config | Guard tier: rollback named, reversible parts first, verify premise |
| Run a destructive bulk op | Dry-run or list matches first; one batch, observe, then the rest |
| Send / publish anything external | Full stop — confirm intent explicitly; it cannot be unsent |
| Act on an unverified assertion | Verify the premise before the expensive step |
| Do something free and local | Just do it — speed here is correct |

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [kumosan2](https://github.com/kumosan2)
- **Source:** [kumosan2/Fablepowers](https://github.com/kumosan2/Fablepowers)
- **License:** MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.

## Pricing

- **Free** — Free

## Security capabilities

Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access:

- **Network access:** no
- **Filesystem access:** no
- **Shell / process execution:** no
- **Environment & secrets:** no
- **Dynamic code execution:** no

*"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.*


## Versions

- **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source.

## Links

- Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-kumosan2-fablepowers-assessing-risk
- Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/kumosan2
- Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse

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Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. Every listing is security-reviewed. Creators keep 70%.