ape-poke-holes

ape-poke-holes is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from arpitbbhayani/ape-skills. It costs 118 tokens per session (3,984 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An adversarial review helper for design documents, specifications, plans, blog posts, and technical explanations. It looks for failure cases, hidden assumptions, missing steps, and claims that are not supported.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to challenge a technical write-up, find unstated risks and scale limits, identify unanswered reader questions, and test whether a design can actually be understood from its documentation.
Why use it?
It exposes problems that a friendly review may overlook and shows where a reader could misunderstand the document. The review focuses only on gaps and does not propose fixes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to challenge a technical write-up, find unstated risks and scale limits, identify unanswered reader questions, and test whether a design can actually be understood from its documentation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes
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 arpitbbhayani/ape-skills --skill ape-poke-holes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/arpitbbhayani/ape-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 ape-poke-holes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes/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 ape-poke-holes

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/arpitbbhayani/ape-skills/ape-poke-holes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,984 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00118 $0.03984
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01992
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00797
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00398

Measured 12d ago against content hash 8d6094f36301, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ape-poke-holes scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

2. **A URL**: a string starting with `http://` or `https://`. Use `WebFetch` to download the content, then strip navigation, sidebars, footers, and comments before working on the body. If the URL points to a PDF, downloa
ape-poke-holes/SKILL.md · 182 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 182 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Poke Holes Skill

An adversarial reviewer. Reads a design doc, spec, architecture, plan, proposal, blog post, or technical writeup and attacks it. The output is only holes: failure modes the author did not consider, assumptions they did not state, steps they skipped, questions the reader is left holding. No praise, no balance, no "overall this looks solid". If a section survives the attack, it simply does not appear in the output.

There are two kinds of hole, and this skill hunts both:

  • Holes in the design: the system does not work as described, or works only until something plausible happens to it.
  • Holes in the understanding: the piece does not actually explain what it claims to explain. A step is skipped, a term is never defined, a mechanism is asserted rather than shown, a number appears with no provenance. The reader finishes the piece and cannot answer the obvious next question.

The second kind matters as much as the first. A design nobody can reconstruct from the doc is a broken design. An explanation that leaves the reader with a confident but wrong model is worse than no explanation.

The skill pokes holes; it does not fill them. Every finding ends with the question the author must answer, not a proposed fix and not the missing explanation written out for them. Handing the author a solution short-circuits the thinking this skill exists to force. The author closes the holes; the ape only finds them.

Scope: this skill attacks substance, not style. Clunky sentences, weak headings, passive voice, and paragraph order are editing concerns and out of scope -- ape-cut-fluff and ape-review-blog own those. Wording becomes a finding only when it costs comprehension or precision: two engineers would build two different systems from it, or a reader would walk away believing something false.

What Counts as a Hole

Attack the document along these lines. Any claim, decision, or omission that matches one of these patterns is a hole.

Holes in the design

Read the full file on GitHub · 182 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 · 182 lines · 118 tokens per session scan A 8d6094f36301

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ape-poke-holes is a skill published in the GitHub repository arpitbbhayani/ape-skills (40 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 3,984 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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