edit-manifest

edit-manifest is a skill for Claude Code from chrono-meta/forge-harness. It costs 76 tokens per session (3,186 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A change-tracking system for instructions used by coding agents. It records what each edit is expected to improve, then checks the next session to see whether it actually did.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when changing SKILL.md files, rules, or CLAUDE.md instructions and you need to measure their effects and reject changes that do not improve results.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish edits that genuinely improve agent work from edits that only seem helpful or cause regressions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Codex.

Part of the fh-meta plugin — 38 skills, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when changing SKILL.md files, rules, or CLAUDE.md instructions and you need to measure their effects and reject changes that do not improve results.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest
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 chrono-meta/forge-harness --skill edit-manifest
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chrono-meta/forge-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install fh-meta, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 38 skills, 7 agents.

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 edit-manifest

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest/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 edit-manifest

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chrono-meta/forge-harness/edit-manifest.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,186 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 6
    Skill selects an external model or provider that may use a different account or billing plan than the operator expects. Undisclosed model switches can cause unexpected cost or quota consumption.
    Fix: Remove the model/provider override or disclose it prominently and require explicit operator approval before invoking an external coding CLI or billed model.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00076 $0.03186
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01593
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00637
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00319

Measured 10d ago against content hash 8b5684607f79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

edit-manifest 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/fh-meta/skills/edit-manifest/SKILL.md · 267 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 267 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

edit-manifest — Predict-Verify Loop for Harness Edits

Implements two mechanisms from frontier harness research, named as in their source papers (both terms are the papers' own — verified 2026-06-17 against arXiv full text):

  • Change Manifest (AHE, arXiv:2604.25850): each edit attaches a manifest entry declaring a falsifiable predicted impact (expected fixes + at-risk regressions); the next round intersects it with observed task-level deltas to produce a per-edit verdict. (Paper: "the Evolve Agent produces a change manifest…".)
  • Validation Gate (SkillOpt, arXiv:2605.23904): a candidate is accepted only when its selection-split score is strictly greater than the current selection score (ties rejected); rejected edits are kept in an epoch-local buffer, not silently discarded. (Paper: "validation gate" / "held-out gate".)

FH's regression_guard.sh catches backward regressions. edit-manifest closes the forward loop: did the edit actually improve what it claimed to improve?

Boundary vs. verify-bidirectional: verify-bidirectional is reactive — it updates the baseline when the user raises a counter-argument to an AI recommendation. edit-manifest is predictive — it records a forward prediction at edit time and verifies it against outcomes later, with no user counter-argument required. Different axes: one responds to challenge, the other tests a self-declared hypothesis.

Manifest File Location

tracks/_meta/edit_manifest.yaml

Single append-only file. Entries are never deleted — they accumulate as the harness's edit history and negative-feedback buffer.

Manifest Entry Format

- id: em-{YYYY-MM-DD}-{slug}
  date: YYYY-MM-DD
  file: plugins/fh-meta/skills/{skill}/SKILL.md   # relative to repo root
  edit_summary: "added 'trigger phrase X' to natural language triggers"
  predicted_impact: "users entering via phrase X will increase — estimate +1 session/week"
  predicted_measurable_by: "session start logs or user utterance pattern in next 2 sessions"
  validation_status: pending   # pending | verified | falsified | untestable
  validation_type: judged      # mechanical (grep/count/git) | judged (cited observation) | untestable
  baseline_value: null         # number, when a metric exists (mechanical)
  measured_value: null         # filled at VERIFY
  delta: null                  # measured_value - baseline_value, or null
  match_score: null            # at VERIFY: 1.0 confirmed | 0.5 partial | 0.0 contradicted
  verified_at: null
  verification_note: null      # one-line MEASURED outcome + cited evidence (never bare "seems better")
  gate_decision: null   # accepted | redefine | rejected

Read the full file on GitHub · 267 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 · 267 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 8b5684607f79

Subscribe to this mod's changes

edit-manifest is a skill published in the GitHub repository chrono-meta/forge-harness (14 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,186 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 2026-08-30.

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