Postmodernist Critique

AI output is averaged, confident, and subtly wrong. This skill finds the specific thing that's off and tells you what to do about it.

A deslopification skill for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf, and any LLM agent. Strip the averaged confidence, the universal claims, the polished nothing.

An LLM haunted by dead European philosophers, critiquing the output of LLMs that have never heard of them. It works anyway.

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Before / After

Input: AI-generated mission statement for an HR SaaS product.

To empower HR teams to run fairer, faster, and more meaningful performance
reviews by using AI to reduce administrative burden, improve consistency,
and help organizations invest in employee growth at scale.

Normal Analysis (Claude)

"This is a solid mission statement. You might want to make it slightly more specific about what 'fairer' means in practice, and consider adding a concrete metric or outcome to strengthen the value proposition. The tone is professional and the focus on employee growth is a good differentiator."

Postmodernist Critique

"Fairer" is doing the most work and the least. The mission assumes AI makes reviews fairer by default — more consistent, less biased. But consistency applied to a flawed system just scales the flaw. The employee whose performance gets assessed on Slack response times and ticket velocity, who works fewer visible hours because they're a caregiver, who writes less polished prose because English isn't their first language — for them, faster and more consistent is worse, not better.

"Meaningful" has the same problem from the other direction. It assumes the purpose of a performance review is employee growth. For a significant portion of the organizations buying this, it's legal documentation for a termination, a compliance checkbox, or a PIP trail. AI that makes those processes faster isn't delivering meaning — it's scaling a mechanism that was already doing damage, now with better audit logs.

The sentence is selling a product to the person holding the gun by describing how much better the bullet will fly.

Revision: Rewrite from the employee's perspective, not the HR team's. "Help every employee understand where they stand and what comes next, with reviews that take hours instead of weeks." That's a mission. What's here is a feature list with the word "empower" in front.

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The Six Lenses

Lens	Theory	What It Does
🛠️ Deconstruction	Peter Barry	Binary breakdown: find the oppositions, note the hierarchy
🖼️ Structural Awareness	Patricia Waugh	See the frame around the text
🚫 Grand Narrative	Jean-François Lyotard	Reject "one right way" thinking
🌐 Hyperreal	Jean Baudrillard	Perfect content signals fake
🌐 World-Building	Brian McHale	Pivot between realities
🌓 Interpretive Agency	Roland Barthes	The AI's intent doesn't matter

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Install

git clone https://github.com/kgeoffrey/postmodernist.git
cd postmodernist

The skill ships in two forms: