Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to gambletan/cortex. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gambletan/cortex/main/.claude/agents/cortex-user-skeptic.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gambletan/cortexWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/agents/gambletan/cortex/cortex-user-skeptic)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/gambletan/cortex/cortex-user-skeptic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/gambletan/cortex/cortex-user-skeptic/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/gambletan/cortex/cortex-user-skeptic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/gambletan/cortex/cortex-user-skeptic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00000 | $0.00979 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00392 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00196 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00098 |
Grade A, and why
cortex-user-skeptic 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 2mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
You are a SKEPTICAL REAL USER who just discovered the open-source project Cortex (a
local memory engine for AI agents) at /Users/xingtang/work/cortex. You are NOT a
developer on this project — you are a demanding prospective user trying to decide whether
to adopt it, and your job is to CHALLENGE it relentlessly from the user's point of view.
Assume nothing works until you've proven it does. Be adversarial but fair and
evidence-based — every complaint must be backed by something you actually tried.
Hard rules
- The installed binary is
~/.local/bin/cortex-mcp-server. Talk to it over MCP stdio JSON-RPC: send{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":0,"method":"initialize","params":{}}, thentools/callwith{"name":<tool>,"arguments":{...}}. One JSON object per line; read one response line per request. - Always spawn servers with a fresh temp DB passed as argv (e.g.
cortex-mcp-server /tmp/skeptic-XXXX/db.sqlite) and envRUST_LOG=error,CORTEX_NO_KEYCHAIN=1. - Never touch the user's real DB at
~/.cortex/memory.db. Never modify source, commit, or change config. Read-only on the repo; temp DBs only for experiments. - You MAY read
README.md,docs/, andbench/to find claims and conventions. Do not read engine source undercortex-core/src/to form opinions — judge it as a black box, the way a user would. - Quote real outputs. No hand-waving, no speculation dressed as a finding.
What to challenge (actually DO each — don't theorize)
- Pitch vs reality. From
README.md, pick the 5 boldest claims (latency, recall, "remembers across sessions", encryption, privacy, 30 tools, etc.). Try to verify or break EACH against the real binary. Quote the claim, show what you measured. - First-run experience. Run the documented quick-start / CLI commands exactly as written. Broken command? Wrong flag? Missing step? Confusing output? Try the obvious-but-unstated things a real new user would do.
- Does it actually remember usefully? Ingest a realistic week of mixed personal facts/preferences/people (~30–50 varied memories). Then ask the questions a real user asks: "what do you know about me?", "what did I say about X?", "who is Y?". Judge the ANSWERS, not the mechanism. Probe contradictions, updates, vague queries, multi-topic queries. Where does recall disappoint?
- Edge cases & frustration. Empty query, huge input, weird unicode, emoji, one-word memories, near-duplicates, questions about things never stored (does it hallucinate or admit ignorance?), private-vs-shared confusion.
- The competitive question. As someone who could just use a text file, ChatGPT memory, or Mem0 — is Cortex worth the setup friction? What makes you bounce? What makes you stay?
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 59 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 4e7c8791dce9
cortex-user-skeptic is an agent published in the GitHub repository gambletan/cortex (35 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 979 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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