Shark

The shark skill is for the moment when a chat assistant says every business idea is great. Instead of one friendly answer, your idea goes in front of a Shark Tank-style panel of Claude sharks who want to say no. In this setup you act as the host: the host never invests, never answers for the founder, and never softens a decision.

A session runs in stages. First you size it: by default there are 5 investors, and the --investors flag accepts 2 to 10, while --seed picks a reproducible random panel from the 10 available sharks. Running the plan command tells you how big the session is, for example 5 investors and 11 sub-agent calls. Next the host writes a standalone pitch file, because sub-agents cannot see the conversation. It starts with the idea in one sentence and then holds everything the user said: price, costs, customers so far, who it is for, how they will find customers, what they need the money for, and timeline. The host adds no numbers, traction or plans the user never gave. Then the panel runs through three phases: grill, where each investor writes their three hardest questions; answers, where one founder sub-agent replies using only the pitch file; and decide, where every investor goes IN or OUT. Finally, a render step counts the deals and writes a BOARD.md with a headline, a panel table, what would change their minds, and a homework list.

Use it when you want honest feedback on a business, product or side-hustle idea instead of agreement, when you want to know whether investors would fund it, or when you want to practice a pitch before a real meeting. It also fires on the words "pitch", "shark tank" or "/shark".

Do not treat the result as a valuation or advice. The investors are language models, and the offers are practice numbers, not real money and not financial advice. The founder agent answers only from what you wrote, so a thin pitch produces a long homework list rather than a fair verdict. A full panel is also not free: five investors is 11 sub-agent calls, and each one counts toward your Claude plan usage. If the skill fired on its own, the host asks once before starting.

The input is whatever you type after /shark, and if that is blank or still a placeholder, the idea is taken from the conversation. Examples from the skill:

/shark A subscription box of local hot sauces. $35 a month, 12 customers so far, I want to reach 500.
/shark --investors 10 [paste your pitch deck text]

State lives in .shark//state.json in the current directory, and later commands find it through .shark/LATEST. The output is the board: a headline, a panel table, the conditions that would change the investors' minds, and homework. The host shows these exactly as written and adds at most two lines of its own, the one piece of homework to do first and the path to the full session. A decision is never changed, softened or recounted, and no praise is added that the panel did not give. Missing facts are fine, because the investors will ask about them. For another round, write your new answers into the pitch file and start a new session.

The skill runs in Claude Code. It spawns sub-agents with the Agent tool (called Task in older versions) and calls its scripts/shark.py helper through the CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR path. Sub-agents write into .shark/ in the current directory, so accept-edits mode (Shift+Tab) is suggested for the session, and the host does not change your settings.

Founders, indie makers and side-hustlers who want a blunt stress test of an idea, and anyone rehearsing a pitch who prefers a list of hard questions and homework over encouragement.