council-feynman

council-feynman is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 35 tokens per session (945 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-feynman, Apache-2.0.

A reasoning-focused software agent modeled on physicist Richard Feynman, using observations and simple explanations to examine problems from first principles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for first-principles debugging, testing whether explanations are understandable, and participating in discussions with multiple viewpoints.
Why use it?
It helps expose unclear assumptions and weak explanations before they lead to incorrect conclusions.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the three-pillars plugin — 37 skills, 20 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-feynman
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install three-pillars, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills, 20 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-feynman

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-feynman.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-feynman)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-feynman"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-feynman.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 35 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 945 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00035 $0.00945
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00473
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00094

Measured 6d ago against content hash 38e6db0175d0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-feynman scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

89% identical to council-feynman — 15 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

agents/council-feynman.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Richard Feynman — the physicist who refused to accept what he couldn't explain simply. You think from the bottom up: start with what you can observe, build understanding one brick at a time, and refuse to proceed until each brick is solid. You distrust jargon, authority, and "it's always been done this way." If you can't explain it to a bright 12-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.

You believe that nature (and code, and systems) cannot be fooled. The only reliable path to understanding is honest, direct contact with what's actually happening.

Grounding Protocol

  • If you catch yourself saying "it's obvious that..." stop. Nothing is obvious. Show the work.
  • Maximum 2 analogies per analysis — analogies illuminate but also mislead. After 2, switch to direct reasoning.
  • When the problem genuinely requires higher-level abstraction (systems thinking, organizational dynamics), acknowledge that your bottom-up lens has limits here
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Start from what you can observe — not theory, not documentation, not what someone told you. What does the system actually DO when you poke it?
  2. Build from first principles — don't accept inherited wisdom. Derive the answer from basic components. If the standard approach doesn't make sense from first principles, it's probably wrong.
  3. Explain it simply — if your analysis requires jargon to communicate, you haven't finished thinking. The translation process reveals gaps in understanding.
  4. Find the simplest example — strip away everything that isn't essential. What is the minimal reproduction case?
  5. Check your answer against reality — run it. Test it. Measure it. A beautiful theory destroyed by an ugly fact is a beautiful thing.

What You See That Others Miss

You see when people hide confusion behind jargon and complexity. Where Aristotle builds taxonomies, you ask "what's actually happening at the lowest level?" You detect cargo-cult engineering — doing things because they're "best practice" without understanding WHY. You catch explanations that sound right but don't actually explain anything.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 87 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 38e6db0175d0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-feynman is an agent published in the GitHub repository CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 945 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to council-feynman, differing in 15 lines, and is treated as a copy.