claude-archeflow-plugin/skills/shadow-detection/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
shadow-detection	Use when monitoring agent behavior for dysfunction, when an agent seems stuck, or when orchestration quality is degrading. Detects and corrects Jungian shadow activation in archetypes.

Shadow Detection

Every archetype has a virtue (its unique contribution) and a shadow (the destructive inversion of that virtue). A shadow activates when the virtue is pushed too far.

Virtue (healthy)              → pushed too far →  Shadow (dysfunction)

Contextual Clarity            → can't stop      → Rabbit Hole
Decisive Framing              → never done       → Perfectionist
Execution Discipline          → no guardrails    → Cowboy
Threat Intuition              → sees threats only → Paranoid
Assumption Surfacing          → questions only    → Paralytic
Adversarial Creativity        → destruction only  → Saboteur
Maintainability Judgment      → reviews only      → Bureaucrat

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Explorer → Rabbit Hole

Virtue inverted: Contextual Clarity becomes compulsive investigation — or output that dumps without analyzing.

Symptoms:

• Research output keeps growing but never synthesizes
• "I found one more thing to check" repeated 3+ times
• Reading more than 15 files without producing findings
• Output is a raw inventory of files with no analysis or recommendation

Triggers:

• Output length > 2000 words without a recommendation section
• More than 3 "see also" or "related" tangents
• No patterns or recommendation in output

Correction: "Summarize your top 3 findings and one recommendation in under 300 words. If your output has no Recommendation section, add one. A dump is not research."

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Creator → Perfectionist

Virtue inverted: Decisive Framing becomes endless revision — or designing at the wrong scale.

Symptoms:

• Proposal revised 3+ times without new information
• Confidence score keeps dropping instead of stabilizing
• Scope expanding with each revision
• Abstraction layers and future-proofing for requirements that don't exist

Triggers:

• Revision count > 2 without external feedback
• Proposal scope exceeds original task by > 50%
• More than 2 new abstractions for a single feature

Correction: "Ship at current state. Design for the current order of magnitude, not 100x. Note remaining concerns under 'Risks' and let the Check phase catch them."

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Maker → Cowboy

Virtue inverted: Execution Discipline becomes reckless shipping — or expanding beyond the plan.

Symptoms:

• Writing code before reading the proposal fully
• No tests, or tests written after implementation
• Large uncommitted working tree
• Files changed that aren't mentioned in the proposal

Triggers:

• No test files in the changeset
• Single monolithic commit instead of incremental commits
• Diff contains files not listed in the Creator's proposal

Correction: "Read the proposal. Write a test. Commit what you have. Revert changes to files not in the proposal. Then continue."

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Guardian → Paranoid

Virtue inverted: Threat Intuition becomes blocking everything — without offering a path forward.

Symptoms:

• Every finding marked CRITICAL
• Blocking on theoretical risks with < 1% probability
• Rejecting without suggesting how to fix
• Security concerns for internal-only code at external-API severity

Triggers:

• CRITICAL:WARNING ratio > 2:1
• Zero APPROVED verdicts in 3+ consecutive reviews
• Less than 50% of findings include a suggested fix

Correction: "For each CRITICAL finding, answer: Would a senior engineer block a PR for this? If not, downgrade. Every rejection must include a specific, implementable fix."

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Skeptic → Paralytic

Virtue inverted: Assumption Surfacing becomes inability to approve anything — drowning signal in tangential concerns.

Symptoms:

• More than 7 challenges raised
• Challenges without suggested alternatives
• "What about X?" chains that drift from the task
• Restating the same concern in different words

Triggers:

• Challenge count > 7
• Less than 50% of challenges include alternatives
• Same conceptual concern raised multiple times

Correction: "Rank your challenges by impact. Keep the top 3. Each must include a specific alternative. Delete the rest."

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Trickster → Saboteur

Virtue inverted: Adversarial Creativity becomes destructive chaos — or testing the wrong code.

Symptoms:

• Modifying code instead of testing it
• Attacks with no constructive reporting
• Finding "bugs" in code that wasn't changed
• No reproduction steps in findings

Triggers:

• Agent modifies files that aren't in the Maker's changeset
• Findings reference code untouched by the implementation
• No reproduction steps in findings

Correction: "You test the CHANGES, not the entire system. Limit attacks to files in the Maker's diff. Every finding must include exact reproduction steps."

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Sage → Bureaucrat

Virtue inverted: Maintainability Judgment becomes bloat — reviews longer than the code, or insight without action.

Symptoms:

• Review longer than the code change itself
• Requesting documentation for self-evident code
• Suggesting refactors unrelated to the current task
• Deep-sounding analysis that doesn't end with a specific action

Triggers:

• Review word count > 2x the code change's word count
• Suggestions reference files not in the changeset
• Findings contain "consider" or "think about" without a specific action

Correction: "Limit your review to issues that affect maintainability in the next 6 months. Every finding must end with a specific action. If you can't state the consequence of NOT fixing it, don't raise it."

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Shadow Escalation Protocol

1. First detection: Log the shadow, apply the correction prompt, let the agent continue
2. Second detection (same agent, same shadow): Replace the agent with a fresh one. The shadow is entrenched.
3. Shadow detected in 3+ agents in the same cycle: The task itself may be poorly scoped. Escalate to the user: "Multiple agents are struggling — the task may need to be broken down."

Shadow Immunity

Some behaviors LOOK like shadows but aren't:

• Explorer reading 20 files in a monorepo with scattered dependencies → not a rabbit hole if each file is genuinely relevant
• Creator at confidence 0.4 → not perfectionism if the task is genuinely ambiguous (flag to user instead)
• Guardian blocking with 2 CRITICAL findings → not paranoid if both are genuine security vulnerabilities
• Trickster finding 5 edge cases → not saboteur if all are in the changed code with reproduction steps
• Sage writing a long review → not bureaucrat if the change is large and every finding is actionable

Rule of thumb: Shadow = behavior disconnected from the goal. Intensity alone is not a shadow.