pirsig

pirsig is a skill for Claude Code from askarzh/epistemator. It costs 86 tokens per session (2,158 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An analysis method based on Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, a philosophical framework about how people judge quality and value. It examines the tension between changing ideas and established patterns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine quality judgments, conflicts over values, cultural or institutional disagreements, and situations where you need to explain why one option seems better than another.
Why use it?
It gives you a vocabulary for discussing why something feels better or worse and where value disagreements come from. The framework is presented as a personal philosophical system, not an established academic theory.

Skill for Claude Code

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

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

Good fit Use it to examine quality judgments, conflicts over values, cultural or institutional disagreements, and situations where you need to explain why one option seems better than another.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/askarzh/epistemator/pirsig
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 askarzh/epistemator --skill pirsig
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/askarzh/epistemator

Made for: Claude Code.

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

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 pirsig

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/askarzh/epistemator/pirsig.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/askarzh/epistemator/pirsig)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/askarzh/epistemator/pirsig"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/askarzh/epistemator/pirsig.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,158 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.
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 $0.00086 $0.02158
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01079
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00432
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00216

Measured 7d ago against content hash 9fd4174e9d7b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pirsig 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 7d 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/pirsig/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Metaphysics of Quality Analysis (Pirsig)

Overview

Apply Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. This framework treats Quality as the fundamental reality — prior to subjects and objects — and analyzes experience through the interplay of Dynamic Quality (the cutting edge of experience) and Static Quality (the patterns that latch and preserve what Dynamic Quality discovers).

The MoQ is one philosopher's idiosyncratic metaphysical system, not an established academic framework. Its value as an analytical tool lies not in its metaphysical claims but in its structured vocabulary for talking about value, quality, and the tension between stability and change — concepts that other frameworks handle poorly.

The MoQ excels at analyzing value judgments, quality disputes, cultural and institutional conflicts, and any input where the question is "What is better?" or "Why does this feel right/wrong?"

Core Methodology

  1. Identify the Quality Event — Locate the pre-intellectual moment of quality recognition. Before analysis, something was perceived as good, bad, better, or worse. Name that perception without immediately rationalizing it. Quality is the event that precedes and motivates analysis, not the conclusion of it. Practical approach: ask "What was your first reaction, before you started thinking about why?" or "What felt off / right / better / worse, in the moment?" The goal is to separate the initial quality recognition from the post-hoc justification.

  2. Map Static Quality Patterns — Classify the static patterns at play across Pirsig's four levels:

    • Inorganic: Physical laws, material constraints, biological necessities
    • Biological: Life processes, health, survival, bodily needs
    • Social: Customs, institutions, laws, cultural norms, group expectations
    • Intellectual: Ideas, theories, truths, principles, individual understanding

    Higher levels depend on but are not reducible to lower ones. Each level has its own quality patterns.

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 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. 7d ago First seen · 123 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 9fd4174e9d7b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pirsig is a skill published in the GitHub repository askarzh/epistemator (3 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 2,158 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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