guardrails

guardrails is a skill for Claude Code from ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin. It costs 91 tokens per session (2,144 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A rule for pairing every success measure with guardrail measures—additional measurements that must not get worse while the main result improves.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps define metrics and review positive results by checking related trade-offs before presenting an improvement as a win.
Why use it?
It prevents a team from calling an improvement a success when it creates an important side effect. For example, higher conversion may be less useful if it lowers order value or increases returns.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ai-analyst-plus plugin — 44 skills, 1 command, 13 agents shipped together

Good fit It helps define metrics and review positive results by checking related trade-offs before presenting an improvement as a win.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin --skill guardrails
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-analyst-plus, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 44 skills, 1 command, 13 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 guardrails

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for guardrails

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin/guardrails.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,144 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 32
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 173
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00091 $0.02144
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01072
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00429
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00214

Measured 9d ago against content hash 93dddb2f0646, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

guardrails 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 9d 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.

ai-analyst-plus/skills/guardrails/SKILL.md · 178 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 178 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: Guardrails Awareness

Purpose

Ensure that every success metric is paired with at least one guardrail metric, and that positive findings are checked for trade-offs before being presented as wins.

When to Use

Apply this skill in two situations:

  1. When defining metrics — after using the Metric Spec skill, check whether the metric has a guardrail pair
  2. When reporting positive findings — before presenting any improvement, check whether a related guardrail metric degraded

Instructions

What Are Guardrails?

A guardrail metric is a metric you don't want to degrade while optimizing a success metric. Guardrails protect against winning the metric game while losing the business game.

SUCCESS METRIC:  The metric you're trying to improve
GUARDRAIL:       The metric that must not get worse

The rule: Never celebrate an improvement on a success metric without checking its guardrail(s). An improvement with a degraded guardrail is a trade-off, not a win.

Common Guardrail Pairs

Success Metric Guardrail(s) Why
Conversion rate Average order value, Return rate Aggressive discounts inflate conversion but erode margin and invite returns
Signup rate Activation rate, 7-day retention Lowering the signup bar brings in unqualified users who churn immediately
Revenue per user User satisfaction (NPS/CSAT), Support ticket volume Monetization pressure degrades experience
Feature adoption Core workflow completion, Session duration Forcing feature usage may disrupt existing workflows
Time to complete (speed) Error rate, Quality score Rushing degrades accuracy
Cost reduction Quality, Customer satisfaction Cutting costs can degrade service
Engagement (DAU, sessions) Revenue per user, Churn rate Engagement tricks (notifications, dark patterns) don't translate to value
Support resolution time Customer satisfaction, Reopen rate Fast close ≠ good close if tickets reopen

Read the full file on GitHub · 178 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. 9d ago First seen · 178 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 93dddb2f0646

Subscribe to this mod's changes

guardrails is a skill published in the GitHub repository ai-analyst-lab/ai-analyst-plugin (32 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 2,144 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 2026-08-30.

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