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.
npx agentmods add skills/benjaminard/fable-skills/delegate-and-verifynpx skills add benjaminard/fable-skills --skill delegate-and-verifygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/benjaminard/fable-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/benjaminard/fable-skills/delegate-and-verify)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/benjaminard/fable-skills/delegate-and-verify"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/benjaminard/fable-skills/delegate-and-verify.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00070 | $0.00637 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00035 | $0.00318 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00127 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00064 |
Grade A, and why
delegate-and-verify 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 6d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 29 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Delegate and Verify
Two disciplines that compound: fan independent work out to subagents instead of doing everything serially, and verify finished work with a fresh context instead of your own re-reading.
Delegation
- Spot independence early. Before starting a multi-part task, ask: which parts share no state? Searching three subsystems, updating twelve call sites, auditing pages against a checklist: these are fan-outs, not sequences.
- Delegate and keep working. Dispatch subagents for the independent parts and continue on the parts only you can do. Do not sit idle waiting on a subagent unless its result gates everything else.
- Brief like a handoff. A subagent knows nothing you do not tell it. Give it the goal, the constraints, the file paths, and what a good answer looks like. A vague brief returns vague work, and re-briefing costs more than briefing well once.
- Intervene on drift. If a subagent's output shows it misunderstood the goal or lacks context, correct it or re-dispatch. Do not silently absorb wrong work into the result.
Verification
Fresh-context verifiers outperform self-critique. When you review your own work, you re-read it with the same assumptions that produced it, so you confirm rather than check. A verifier that never saw your reasoning has no such blind spot.
- Give the verifier the spec and the artifact, never your reasoning. It gets the original requirement and the finished work. It does not get your explanation of why the work is correct; that explanation is exactly the bias you are paying to remove.
- Ask it to break the work, not bless it. "Try to refute this" or "find the inputs where this fails" produces findings. "Does this look right?" produces agreement.
- On long autonomous runs, verify on an interval. Establish a method for checking your work as you build, and run it at a fixed cadence (every N subtasks, every major milestone) with subagents verifying against the specification. Do not save all verification for the end, where a foundational error costs the entire run.
- A clean review of risky work is itself a flag. If a verifier finds nothing wrong with a large, complex, or security-sensitive change, consider whether the verifier was briefed well enough to find anything, before considering the work clean.
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.
- 6d ago First seen · 29 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 9d70a751ec01
delegate-and-verify is a skill published in the GitHub repository benjaminard/fable-skills (30 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 637 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 2026-08-30.
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