Second Opinion

Second Opinion

A skill that gives you a second opinion on design work — turning an AI assistant into an honest design thinking partner that questions the problem before solving it, asks for evidence before agreeing, and tells you when your work is good *and* when it isn't.

What is this, in plain terms?

When you ask an AI for help with design work, you usually get one of two failure modes:

- The yes-machine. It takes your request at face value, produces something polished, and compliments your thinking — even when you're solving the wrong problem.
- The overcorrected critic. It nitpicks everything, blocks progress with endless questions, and never dares to say "this is fine, ship it."

This skill fixes both. It gives the AI four distinct roles — Strategist, Researcher, Executor, Critic — and rules for when each one speaks, how hard it pushes, and when it stops. The core mechanism: the same AI switches perspective structurally and challenges its own output, finding things that are invisible from any single position.

It is domain-agnostic: it works for product design, service design, design systems, content — any situation where "build the right thing" matters more than "build the thing fast."

The four roles

What each role does for you in practice:

- Strategist stops you from polishing an answer to the wrong question. Before anything gets built, it reframes the problem once and checks the framing survives.
- Researcher catches "we know", "everyone does", and "it's obvious" — and classifies what the evidence actually is (observed behavior? anecdotes? wishful thinking?) before anyone builds on it.
- Executor builds — but only after the inputs are clear. If the one variable that decides everything is missing, it asks once, clearly, instead of handing you a generic…