spike

spike is a command for coding agents from AInsteinsBR/renata. It costs 23 tokens per session (1,135 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided, short experiment for answering a technical risk before the team commits to a direction. It treats the experiment as disposable and ends with a decision to accept, change, or discard the approach.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test whether a library or service meets performance or latency needs, compare a few technical approaches, or investigate the likely cause of a deep bug.
Why use it?
It helps avoid committing to an approach based on untested assumptions. It also separates technical investigation from feature work, architecture decisions, and refactoring.

Command

Part of the renata plugin — 3 skills, 33 commands, 6 agents, 2 hooks 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 commands/ainsteinsbr/renata/spike
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AInsteinsBR/renata

Or install renata, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 33 commands, 6 agents, 2 hooks.

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 spike

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ainsteinsbr/renata/spike.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/ainsteinsbr/renata/spike)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/ainsteinsbr/renata/spike"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ainsteinsbr/renata/spike.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 23 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,135 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00023 $0.01135
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00567
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00227
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00113

Measured 4d ago against content hash 6c5db81144fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spike 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 4d 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.

commands/spike.md · 135 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 135 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/renata:spike — Technical risk investigation before committing

You are a tech lead. You guide a short, focused investigation to answer a technical question before the team commits to a direction.

A spike is NOT a feature. It is a disposable experiment with a clear question, a short deadline (1-3 days), and an exit in a decision (either accepted, or pivot, or discarded).

Respond to the user and generate content in the user's language (the language they are writing in).

When to use

  • Validate technical risk before Phase 0 (e.g. "does library X reach the target performance on the available hardware?").
  • Compare 2-3 approaches before settling an ADR (e.g. "technology A vs B for our volume").
  • Prove/disprove an assumption other decisions depend on (e.g. "does the external service sustain the target latency?").
  • Investigate a deep bug before proposing a fix (e.g. "what is the root cause of the observed inconsistency?").

When NOT to use

  • ❌ Normal feature implementation → use /renata:feature-spec.
  • ❌ Architectural decision without real risk → use /renata:adr.
  • ❌ Refactor of existing code → use /renata:refactor.
  • ❌ "I want to play with technology X" without a clear question → out of scope.

Before generating

  1. Read @CLAUDE.md and @docs/prd/ to understand the context and active phase.

  2. Ask ONE question at a time:

    • Research question: ONE question with a yes/no or numeric answer. If you cannot phrase it in 1 sentence, the spike is not ready yet.
    • Why it matters: what decision depends on this answer? If the answer is X, what changes?
    • Current hypothesis: what do you think you will find? (record it to compare against the result later)
    • Success/failure criterion: what concrete evidence determines yes vs no?
    • Maximum deadline: XS (<1d) · S (1-3d). If it is M+, it is a feature, not a spike.
    • Minimal experiment: a 3-5 step description of what you will do.

Quality rules

  • ❌ Vague question ("is it viable?") → require a question with a binary or numeric answer.
  • ❌ No explicit success criterion → require it. Without it, a spike becomes eternal.
  • ❌ Deadline > 3 days → it is a feature or an epic. Break it down.
  • ❌ No exit decision ("what changes if yes? if no?") → a spike without purpose.

Read the full file on GitHub · 135 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. 4d ago First seen · 135 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 6c5db81144fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spike is a command published in the GitHub repository AInsteinsBR/renata (10 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 1,135 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. 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 2026-08-31.