reality-grounding

reality-grounding is a skill for Codex from Bono12138/bonobox. It costs 83 tokens per session (1,984 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided inquiry method for finding out how a situation actually works before giving advice or making a plan. It separates confirmed facts from reports, rules, and observed practice.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when important facts are missing, several people describe the situation differently, or a decision depends on real-world feasibility.
Why use it?
Plans based on assumptions about permissions, evidence, people, or available resources can fail. This method gathers targeted evidence, tests it, and revises the understanding before deciding.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: $skill-name invocation.

Good fit Use it when important facts are missing, several people describe the situation differently, or a decision depends on real-world feasibility.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding
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 Bono12138/bonobox --skill reality-grounding
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Bono12138/bonobox

Made for: 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 reality-grounding

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding/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 reality-grounding

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bono12138/bonobox/reality-grounding.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,984 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 $0.00083 $0.01984
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00992
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00397
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00198

Measured 7d ago against content hash a14b07e32b81, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reality-grounding 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate_reality_record.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

tools/reality-grounding/reality-grounding/SKILL.md · 209 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 209 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reality Grounding

Find enough reality to make the next decision without inventing an ideal organisation. This Skill is not a questionnaire and not a one-turn advice generator. It owns an active loop of inquiry, action, observed feedback and revision until the user confirms a real stopping point.

Capability version: 0.4.0.

Read references/active-inquiry.md when material facts are missing, the user asks for proactive investigation, or the available source should be chosen. Read references/reality-record-contract.md when the task needs a durable case record or will feed $reality-strategy. Use scripts/validate_reality_record.py before treating a substantial reality record as ready for strategy. Use references/evaluation-cases.md when testing or changing this Skill's routing and inquiry behaviour.

Lock the decision first

Identify the decision the user must make, the desired result, unacceptable downside, time limit, and which new fact could change the action. If there is no real decision yet, clarify the problem before collecting broad background.

Separate:

  • verified fact;
  • direct user observation or report;
  • formal rule;
  • observed practice;
  • supported inference;
  • working hypothesis;
  • unknown.

A document proves what it says, not that people follow it. A repeated Agent claim does not turn a hypothesis into a fact.

Before substantial advice, decide whether the current information can actually separate the available routes. If a material unknown changes the actor, first step, feasibility or social risk, ask first. A short preview of the branches may explain the question; it must not become a premature catalogue of advice.

Recover the original problem before accepting the proposed method

The user's account may mix an original need with a proposed mechanism. Do not assume that solving the named mechanism solves the real problem. Write both:

  • A — original result: what must become true in the real world;
  • B — proposed route: the process, system, permission, meeting, tool or other mechanism currently being discussed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 209 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 209 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A a14b07e32b81

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reality-grounding is a skill published in the GitHub repository Bono12138/bonobox (5 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 1,984 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 2026-09-05.