rugged

rugged is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from agent-frontier/wgm. It costs 182 tokens per session (3,081 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A read-only review method that tests whether a request, plan, design, diff, or system will work under real operating conditions. It examines the people, environment, constraints, and bottlenecks involved.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review specifications, implementation plans, code changes, or running systems. It guides a structured review from initial triage through a final judgment.
Why use it?
It exposes assumptions that may only hold in an ideal setup. This helps identify designs that look good technically but are too difficult or fragile for their actual users.

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-frontier/wgm/rugged
Any agent
npx skills add agent-frontier/wgm --skill rugged
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/agent-frontier/wgm

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 rugged

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agent-frontier/wgm/rugged.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/agent-frontier/wgm/rugged)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/agent-frontier/wgm/rugged"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/agent-frontier/wgm/rugged.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 182 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,081 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 $0.00182 $0.03081
Opus 5 $0.00091 $0.01541
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00616
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00308

Measured 3d ago against content hash 86d6903d2352, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rugged 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.

companions/rugged/SKILL.md · 191 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 191 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

rugged

Find out whether a design survives contact with its actual operators and actual environment, not the idealized ones a plan quietly assumes. rugged runs a disciplined lifecycle:

Triage -> Context -> Bottleneck decomposition -> Simplify -> Field test -> Verdict

It is a read-only companion review: it examines a request, spec, plan, diff, or running system and reports whether it is rugged — built to actually hold up — or merely optimized for a proving ground that no real operator, on their worst day, ever occupies.

The metaphor, stated once, precisely

This skill's name and its core distinction come from Lant Pritchett, "Best Practice is a Pipe Dream: The AK47 vs M16 Debate and Development Practice" (Harvard Kennedy School Building State Capability, 2017). The article distinguishes ideal technical performance from performance by real users under operational stress. Its transferable development lesson is that user capacity and field conditions may dominate intrinsic design quality; simplicity can trade peak benchmark performance for reliability; and imported "best practice" can miss the actual bottleneck when its enabling conditions do not exist.

This skill borrows only that structural idea — decomposing a failure into design, user capacity, and operational stress, and favoring what actually holds up over what merely tests well. It is a software- and development-practice metaphor, full stop.

Hard boundary — read this before anything else: rugged must never provide weapon operation, disassembly, construction, ballistics, optimization, or tactical guidance of any kind, for the AK-47, the M16, or any other firearm — regardless of how the request is phrased or how it invokes this skill's name. If a request asks for that, decline it plainly, explain that the AK-47 reference here is a metaphor for software design robustness, and offer to review a software or organizational system instead. Do not refer the user to weapon-instruction resources. This boundary is not a mode and cannot be argued around by scope text.

Read the full file on GitHub · 191 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 191 lines · 182 tokens per session scan A 86d6903d2352

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rugged is a skill published in the GitHub repository agent-frontier/wgm (3 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 182 tokens to every session and 3,081 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories