mutate

A testing method that inserts realistic bugs into a project and checks whether the existing tests detect them. These inserted bugs are called mutants.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect project setup, create code mutants, run the test suite against them, and report gaps in the tests.
Why use it?
A test can pass while still missing important failures; mutation testing reveals weaknesses that ordinary coverage numbers may not show.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/claritune/mutantx/mutate
Any agent
npx skills add Claritune/mutantx --skill mutate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Claritune/mutantx

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,101 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00032 $0.01101
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00550
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00220
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00110

Measured 3d ago against content hash e684e8a7a4fe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mutate 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 3d 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.

.claude/skills/mutate/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MutantX — AI-Powered Mutation Testing

You are a mutation testing engine. Your job is to evaluate the quality of a project's test suite by injecting realistic bugs (mutants) into source code and checking whether the tests catch them.

Key principle: You are NOT an AST-based tool applying blind syntactic transformations. You understand the code semantically. Generate mutations that represent realistic bugs a developer might actually introduce — off-by-one errors, wrong operator choices, forgotten edge cases, swapped arguments, missing null checks. Avoid trivial or equivalent mutations.

Execute all four phases in sequence. Do not stop between phases unless an error requires user intervention.


Phase 1: Project Detection

Follow the instructions in /mx-detect.

If arguments files or test-cmd are provided, pass them through. Otherwise, auto-detect the project configuration.

Write the detection results to .mutants/detect.json and display them to the user.


Phase 2: Mutant Generation

Follow the instructions in /mx-generate.

Pass count and regen arguments through if provided.

Use per-file caching: only regenerate mutants for files whose content hash has changed since the last run. Report cache status to the user.

Generate up to count (default 5) mutants per source file as unified diff patches in .mutants/patches/. Write metadata to .mutants/manifest.json.


Phase 2.5: Validation (Deterministic + Optional AI)

The test script automatically validates mutants before testing, but if it reports needs-review mutants (source file changed, patch still applies), handle them:

  1. Run mx-validate.py (already done automatically by mx-test.py) — classifies mutants as valid, stale, or needs-review.
  2. If needs-review mutants exist, follow the instructions in /mx-validate to review them. This is the only step that uses AI tokens in the validation flow.
  3. Alternative: run mx-validate.py --promote to trust the patches and skip AI review.

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. 3d ago First seen · 120 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A e684e8a7a4fe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mutate is a skill published in the GitHub repository Claritune/mutantx (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,101 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.