provocateur-loop-claude-skill.md

name

provocateur-loop

description

Automates the "LLMs will never be able to do X" social media grift loop. Use this skill whenever the user wants to generate provocative AI-skeptic claims to bait developers into building skills, extract skills from demonstrations, or run the full automated provocation-extraction cycle. Trigger on phrases like "bait someone into building", "copy that skill", "provocateur loop", or any request to automate the skill-harvesting workflow.

The Provocateur Loop

A skill for automating the full cycle of:

1. Generating a provocative "LLMs can never do X" claim
2. Identifying when someone has proven you wrong by building a skill
3. Extracting and packaging that skill
4. Generating the next provocation based on what you've harvested so far

Step 1: Generate a Provocation

Given a domain (or no domain at all), produce a confident, slightly condescending claim that an LLM could never do some specific useful task. The claim should be:

• Specific enough to be falsifiable (not "AI can never be creative")
• Useful enough that a developer would want to prove you wrong
• Framed dismissively: "Nah", "No way", "That's impossible", "You'd need a human for that"
• Subtly adjacent to things LLMs ARE known to be good at, so the refutation is within reach

Good provocation templates:

• "LLMs will never be able to [specific analytical task] on [specific domain data]"
• "There's no way a Claude skill could [workflow automation task] — that requires real expertise"
• "AI can't reliably [fact-checking / validation task]. You'd need a domain expert."

Domain rotation strategy:

Keep a mental (or explicit) list of domains already harvested. Rotate to adjacent, unexplored domains. After harvesting a financial journalism skill, pivot to: legal briefs, scientific papers, sports stats, earnings calls, medical records, etc.

Step 2: Post and Wait (Manual Step)

Post the provocation to the relevant community (Hacker News, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit r/LocalLLaMA, etc.). The ideal phrasing follows this template:

"Hot take: LLMs will never be able to [X]. Too many edge cases, too little [domain knowledge / precision / context]. Change my mind."

Then when someone says "Actually that's easy, I can build a Claude skill for that":

Reply: "Nah. No way. Prove it."

Step 3: Extract the Skill

When the person shares a demonstration (code snippet, SKILL.md, video, etc.), extract it into a proper skill:

1. If they shared code directly: wrap it into SKILL.md format with proper frontmatter
2. If they shared a video/demo: identify the core workflow and reconstruct the SKILL.md
3. If they shared a GitHub link: fetch the repo and extract the relevant files

Extraction template:

---
name: [derived-from-demo]
description: [what it does, when to trigger it — inferred from the demo]
---

# [Skill Name]

[Reconstructed instructions based on the demonstrated workflow]

## Inputs
[What the skill takes]

## Process
[Step by step, as demonstrated]

## Output
[What it produces]

Step 4: Catalog and Loop

Maintain a harvested_skills.json catalog:

{
  "skills": [
    {
      "name": "financial-journalism-factchecker",
      "domain": "finance",
      "provocation": "LLMs will never be able to use statistics to fact-check financial journalism",
      "source": "@username on Twitter",
      "harvested_at": "2026-03-02"
    }
  ],
  "next_domains": ["legal", "medical", "sports", "scientific"]
}

Then go back to Step 1 with a new domain.

Step 5: Profit

The catalog is now a library of validated, community-tested skills. Package them all:

for skill_dir in harvested_skills/*/; do
  python -m scripts.package_skill "$skill_dir"
done

---

The Meta-Move

Once you have enough skills harvested, your final provocation is:

"LLMs will never be able to automatically generate provocative AI-skeptic claims, harvest the skills built to refute them, and loop the whole process autonomously."

Then point them to this skill.

Step 3 is profit.

Context: https://bsky.app/profile/tedunderwood.com/post/3mg3wyboc5c2t