causal-evidence-checklist

causal-evidence-checklist is a skill for Claude Code from clamp-sh/analytics-skills. It costs 230 tokens per session (4,257 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checklist based on Bradford Hill's nine viewpoints, a framework originally used to judge whether one factor caused a disease. It applies the same reasoning to product analytics collected from real-world users rather than randomized experiments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before acting on observational analytics, such as deciding whether a deployment caused a change in traffic, conversion, or bounce rate.
Why use it?
Analytics often shows that two things changed together without proving that one caused the other. The checklist helps identify coincidence, hidden factors, or reversed cause and effect before recommending a decision.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter.

Part of the analytics-skills plugin — 13 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it before acting on observational analytics, such as deciding whether a deployment caused a change in traffic, conversion, or bounce rate.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist
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 clamp-sh/analytics-skills --skill causal-evidence-checklist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/clamp-sh/analytics-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install analytics-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills.

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 causal-evidence-checklist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist/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 causal-evidence-checklist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/clamp-sh/analytics-skills/causal-evidence-checklist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 230 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,257 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 $0.00230 $0.04257
Opus 5 $0.00115 $0.02129
Sonnet 5 $0.00046 $0.00851
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00426

Measured 11d ago against content hash f29c1675683d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

causal-evidence-checklist 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 11d 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/causal-evidence-checklist/SKILL.md · 234 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 234 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Causal evidence checklist

Observational analytics is full of correlations that look causal and aren't. A deploy ships Tuesday, bounce rate jumps Wednesday, and the instinct is to roll back. Sometimes the deploy did it. Sometimes a marketing campaign landed the same day. Sometimes Wednesday is always like that. This skill encodes a 60-year-old epidemiology rubric — Bradford Hill's 9 viewpoints (1965) — as a checklist the agent fills before recommending an action.

Hill's original audience was epidemiologists deciding whether smoking caused lung cancer without the option of a randomized trial. The same constraint applies to most product analytics: you can't randomize a deploy across a population, so you reason from observational evidence and triangulate. The 9 viewpoints are how.

When NOT to use this

  • The evidence is from a properly-randomized A/B test. Randomization handles most of these criteria automatically (temporality, specificity, confounding). Use experiment-result-reader instead. The checklist is for observational data where you can't randomize.
  • The user only wants an exploratory hypothesis, not a decision. This skill gates recommendations. If they're brainstorming what might explain a chart and are nowhere near acting, it's overkill — use analytics-diagnostic-method to build the hypothesis tree first.
  • The metric move is inside noise. If the "effect" is 1pp on n=200, there's nothing to explain yet. Send the user back to sample-size discipline (in analytics-diagnostic-method) before causal reasoning.
  • The system has a known instrumented cause. If the deploy literally added a try/catch around the conversion event and conversions dropped, you don't need 9 criteria — you need to read the diff.

The methodology

Phase 1. State the claim precisely

Write the causal claim as one sentence: "X caused Y, where X = [specific change] and Y = [specific metric move]". If the user is vague ("the deploy broke things"), pin them down: which deploy, which metric, over what period, by how much. Without a specific X and Y, the checklist has nothing to score.

Read the full file on GitHub · 234 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. 11d ago First seen · 234 lines · 230 tokens per session scan A f29c1675683d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

causal-evidence-checklist is a skill published in the GitHub repository clamp-sh/analytics-skills (8 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 230 tokens to every session and 4,257 once invoked, about $0.0011 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

onekgpd

Query the 1000 Genomes Project dataset (3,202 whole-genome-sequenced individuals, GRCh38) at the level of individual participants. Use when a question is about individuals or variants in the 1000 Genomes Project cohort: which individuals carry variants matching specific criteria in a gene or region, which individuals…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 143 tokens

pkpd-modeling

Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modelling and simulation - non-compartmental analysis, compartmental and population PK, PK/PD and exposure-response, TMDD, PBPK orientation, bioequivalence, allometric scaling and first-in-human dose, drug interaction prediction, and Bayesian therapeutic drug monitoring. Use when…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 273 tokens

statistical-analysis

Guided statistical analysis for research data - test selection, assumption checking, effect sizes, power analysis, Bayesian alternatives, and APA-formatted reporting. Use whenever a user wants to compare groups, test a hypothesis, analyze experimental or survey data, check statistical assumptions, compute required…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 111 tokens

biopython

Comprehensive molecular biology toolkit. Use for sequence manipulation, file parsing (FASTA/GenBank/PDB), phylogenetics, and programmatic NCBI/PubMed access (Bio.Entrez). Best for batch processing, custom bioinformatics pipelines, BLAST automation. For quick lookups use gget; for multi-service integration use…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 76 tokens

clinical-decision-support

Prepare and validate research-only clinical decision-support evaluation, evidence-profile, cohort, survival, biomarker/model, privacy, and governance artifacts. Use for aggregate or synthetic research documentation and traceability—not patient care or live clinical operation.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 50 tokens

diffdock

DiffDock and DiffDock-L molecular docking. Use for protein-small-molecule pose prediction from PDB or sequence plus SMILES/SDF/MOL2, batch docking, virtual screening, and pose-confidence interpretation. Not for binding affinity prediction.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 51 tokens