butterfly-effect

butterfly-effect is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aka-kika/akakika-skills. It costs 172 tokens per session (1,356 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A short end-of-session note that traces the few observations, failures, accidents, or decisions that were essential to the final result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when closing a long session to record which events made the completed result possible.
Why use it?
It separates the moments that changed the outcome from routine work and dead ends.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when closing a long session to record which events made the completed result possible.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect
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 aka-kika/akakika-skills --skill butterfly-effect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aka-kika/akakika-skills

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 butterfly-effect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect/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 butterfly-effect

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aka-kika/akakika-skills/butterfly-effect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 172 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,356 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00172 $0.01356
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.00678
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00271
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00136

Measured 12d ago against content hash 7aea7b4ae81b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

butterfly-effect 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 12d 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.

skills/session-rituals/butterfly-effect/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Butterfly Effect

A session summary tells you what happened. A butterfly trace tells you which moments were load-bearing — the two to four points where, if something had gone differently, the entire outcome would not exist. Most of a long session is noise: dead ends, routine steps, things that would have happened in any version of the session. The skill's job is filtering, not recording.

The core move is the counterfactual test, applied backward from the outcome:

If not this — then this would not happen.

An event is a butterfly point only if removing it breaks the chain to the final result. "We ran the tests" is not a butterfly point — tests would have run in any version of this session. "Test 3 failed with a timezone error, which is what made us look at the date parsing at all" is a butterfly point: no failure, no looking, no fix.

When this runs

At session close, or when the user invokes it mid-session on the work so far. If the session produced no meaningful outcome (pure exploration, no decision, nothing shipped), say so and skip the trace — an empty trace is more honest than a forced one.

The procedure

Work backward, never forward. Forward walks reproduce the session's own noise; backward walks force every step to justify its causal connection to the end.

  1. Name the outcome. One sentence. The thing that exists now that did not exist at session start: the fix, the decision, the renamed project, the abandoned approach. If there are multiple independent outcomes, trace each separately.

  2. Ask what the outcome directly depended on. Not what preceded it — what it required. Usually one or two things.

  3. Recurse. For each dependency, ask what it required. Keep going until you hit session start or an external input (something the user brought in, an error the world produced, a message that arrived).

  4. Apply the counterfactual test to every node. Delete the node mentally. Does the outcome still plausibly happen, maybe later or by another route? Then it is not a butterfly point — cut it. Only keep nodes whose removal genuinely severs the chain.

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 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. 12d ago First seen · 84 lines · 172 tokens per session scan A 7aea7b4ae81b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

butterfly-effect is a skill published in the GitHub repository aka-kika/akakika-skills (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 172 tokens to every session and 1,356 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.

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