effort-calibration

effort-calibration is a skill for Claude Code from avmnu-sng/sutra. It costs 41 tokens per session (1,488 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for matching the amount of coding-agent work to a task’s complexity and the consequences of getting it wrong.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps decide how many attempts, agents, verification passes, and supporting files a task needs.
Why use it?
It helps avoid under-checking risky changes and overspending effort on simple ones, while keeping essential correctness checks.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the sutra plugin — 19 skills, 4 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit It helps decide how many attempts, agents, verification passes, and supporting files a task needs.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration
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 avmnu-sng/sutra --skill effort-calibration
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/avmnu-sng/sutra

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sutra, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills, 4 agents, 2 hooks.

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 effort-calibration

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration/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 effort-calibration

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/avmnu-sng/sutra/effort-calibration.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,488 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 $0.00041 $0.01488
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00744
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00298
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00149

Measured 10d ago against content hash d058435265b8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

effort-calibration 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 10d 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.

plugins/sutra/skills/effort-calibration/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Effort calibration

Energy is finite and every task asks for a share of it: tokens, parallel agents, verification passes, independent attempts, artifacts. Spend too little on a high-stakes change and you ship a defect; spend a fortune on a typo and you burn the budget the real work needed. Match the spend to the task -- and never buy the savings with correctness.

The two dials

Two independent properties set the budget. Do not collapse them into one.

  • Complexity sets the breadth budget -- how many agents you fan out, how many independent attempts you make, how many artifacts you produce, how wide you cast for coverage. More unknowns and moving parts earn more breadth.
  • Blast radius sets the correctness floor -- which verification is mandatory and non-negotiable. How far a wrong answer reaches earns a higher floor, regardless of how simple the diff looks.

You trade away breadth to save energy. You never trade away the floor.

Classify in four questions

  1. Stakes. Does the change hit an irreversible or public surface -- a release, a data migration, a deletion, auth or a secret, money, or a cross-component invariant? Any yes forces a T3 floor, whatever the diff size.
  2. Reach. Does it touch shared or core code beyond the paths you own?
  3. Knowns. Are the location and the shape of a correct answer already known before you start?
  4. Unknowns. After one read, how many independent unknowns remain -- none, a few, or many?

Map: the stakes answer sets the floor tier; reach and unknowns set the breadth tier; the depth you run is max(floor, breadth). The floor is never lowered to match the breadth.

The tiers

Tier Depth Verification Attempts Artifacts Retry / replan
T0 -- trivial, contained Solo inline, no delegation The change's own check, one pass 1 None -- answer in place 1 replan; a second miss means you misclassified -- escalate
T1 -- standard, localized Solo; delegate only mechanical legwork to one helper Single pass, run the real path 1 Change plus its test 2 attempts, 1 replan
T2 -- complex or shared Fan out parallel reads and traces; keep design and trade-offs yourself; one reviewer who did not build it Adversarial review by a different agent; single verifier 1 plus review; two independent attempts only if the approach is genuinely uncertain Change, test, and a short design note if a decision is load-bearing 3 attempts, 2 replans; front-load disambiguation before building
T3 -- critical, irreversible Fan out a workflow; separate builder, adversarial reviewer, and independent completeness validator -- never the same agent Adversarial multi-vote (two or more independent reviewers, contradictions reconciled) plus an independent gate that re-runs the acceptance checks 2-3 independent attempts on the uncertain core; choose by evidence, not confidence Design doc or ledger, tests, an integration/topology slice, a deferred-items ledger Bounded but every replan logged; human sign-off at the consensus gate

Read the full file on GitHub · 107 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. 10d ago First seen · 107 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A d058435265b8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

effort-calibration is a skill published in the GitHub repository avmnu-sng/sutra (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,488 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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