cartesian

A structured problem-solving method adapted from René Descartes' approach to reasoning. It questions assumptions, breaks a complex problem into parts, orders those parts, and rebuilds the overall picture.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze complex systems, unclear questions, hidden assumptions, and arguments that need to be reduced to first principles before being reconstructed.
Why use it?
It makes tangled problems easier to inspect by moving from unclear wholes to smaller, testable pieces. It also checks how the pieces interact so important whole-system behavior is not lost.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the epistemator plugin — 6 skills, 6 commands, 1 agent shipped together

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/askarzh/epistemator/cartesian
Any agent
npx skills add askarzh/epistemator --skill cartesian
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/askarzh/epistemator

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install epistemator, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 6 commands, 1 agent.

Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,648 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 $0.00070 $0.01648
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00824
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00330
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00165

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2cfacb7c7229, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cartesian 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 2d 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/cartesian/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cartesian Reductionist Analysis

Overview

A modern adaptation of Descartes' method of analysis from the Discourse on Method and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. This method systematically questions assumptions, decomposes, orders, and enumerates to arrive at clear and distinct understanding of any subject.

Unlike naive reductionism ("just break it into parts"), this method recognizes that decomposition can destroy emergent properties — wholes that behave differently from the sum of their parts. The reconstruction step is therefore essential: after decomposition, the analysis must account for how parts interact to produce the whole, including properties that exist only at the level of the whole.

Cartesian Reductionism excels at analyzing complex systems, unclear problems, tangled arguments, and any input where the whole is too complex to grasp without decomposition.

Core Methodology — The Four Rules

  1. Rule of Evidence (Question Assumptions) — Accept nothing as true that is not clearly and distinctly known to be so. Identify every assumption, presupposition, and received opinion in the input. In applied analysis, this means testing assumptions against evidence and logic — not Descartes' radical hyperbolic doubt, but a practical inventory of what is well-grounded vs. what is merely taken for granted.

  2. Rule of Division (Decompose) — Divide the subject into as many parts as possible and as necessary for adequate resolution. Each part should be simple enough to be understood in isolation. Continue subdividing until reaching elements that are self-evident or irreducible.

  3. Rule of Order (Reconstruct) — Begin with the simplest, most easily known elements and ascend step by step to knowledge of the most complex. Each step must follow necessarily from the previous. Build understanding from foundations upward.

  4. Rule of Enumeration (Verify) — Make enumerations so complete and reviews so comprehensive that nothing is omitted. Check every link in the chain. Ensure no part has been skipped or assumed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 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. 2d ago First seen · 124 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 2cfacb7c7229

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cartesian is a skill published in the GitHub repository askarzh/epistemator (3 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 1,648 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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