stress-test

A structured method for examining an important decision from several analytical viewpoints. It deliberately looks for less obvious possibilities that a standard, typical analysis may miss.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare business strategies, content formats, hiring choices, product categories, or other options where the trade-offs are unclear.
Why use it?
It helps expose overlooked risks, alternatives, and assumptions when the first answer feels predictable. The method uses multiple candidate analyses and a decision brief.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/agent-engineer-master/skill-engineer/stress-test
Any agent
npx skills add Agent-Engineer-Master/skill-engineer --skill stress-test
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Agent-Engineer-Master/skill-engineer

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,691 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 $0.00109 $0.01691
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00846
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00338
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00169

Measured 3d ago against content hash 621401512b67, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

stress-test 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 3d 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.

operations/stress-test/SKILL.md · 143 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/stress-test — Strategic Decision Analysis

Runs a three-phase decision analysis using verbalized sampling to surface tail-distribution insights — the non-obvious analyses that standard prompting suppresses.

Usage:

  • /stress-test should I enter the home wellness category or stay narrower?
  • /stress-test two content formats: long-form carousel vs short-form daily posts
  • /stress-test hire a contractor now vs wait until revenue hits $10k/mo

Background

After alignment training (RLHF/DPO), LLMs suffer from mode collapse: they return the most typical analysis — safe, expected, rarely wrong but rarely surprising. The genuinely valuable insights live in the tails of the distribution.

Verbalized sampling (Zhang et al., Stanford 2025) fixes this: by asking the model to generate multiple candidate responses with probability estimates, it forces reasoning across the full distribution, including the suppressed tails. Diversity gains of 1.6–2.1x in creative tasks have been reported.

Important caveat (from follow-up research, Jun 2025): The probability numbers are unreliable — LLMs can describe a distribution accurately but don't faithfully sample from it. The mechanism that actually works is the diversity forcing (generate N, select from the non-obvious end), not the precision of the scores. Use the scores as a ranking device, not a measurement.


Step 0 — Load Context

Before running the analysis, read the relevant context files for this project:

  • Your personal/founder context file — profile, constraints, time/financial constraints
  • Your constraints file — hard constraints on any decision
  • Your anti-goals or strategic boundaries file
  • If a product/store decision: your store or product context file
  • If a brand/content decision: your brand summary file

Adjust these paths to match your project structure. The goal is grounding the analysis in real constraints before reasoning begins.

Reframe the question if needed after reading context (e.g. "build vs buy" might actually be "delegate vs own").

Read the full file on GitHub · 143 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. 3d ago First seen · 143 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 621401512b67

Subscribe to this mod's changes

stress-test is a skill published in the GitHub repository Agent-Engineer-Master/skill-engineer (8 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 1,691 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.