socratic

socratic is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from coolTheWorld/evolution-skills. It costs 30 tokens per session (1,153 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A question-based method for uncovering what someone is really asking, by asking one focused question at a time before giving an answer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to separate facts, interpretations, opinions, and goals, test what could change the conclusion, and identify the key question worth answering.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of answering an interpretation of the problem instead of the problem that actually matters.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the evolution plugin — 11 skills shipped together

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/cooltheworld/evolution-skills/socratic
Any agent
npx skills add coolTheWorld/evolution-skills --skill socratic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/coolTheWorld/evolution-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install evolution, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 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 socratic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cooltheworld/evolution-skills/socratic.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cooltheworld/evolution-skills/socratic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cooltheworld/evolution-skills/socratic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cooltheworld/evolution-skills/socratic.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,153 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 5.1 $0.00030 $0.01153
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00576
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00231
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00115

Measured 5d ago against content hash ef83baf8a49f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

socratic 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 5d 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/socratic/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

What a person asks and what they mean are often two different questions, and the gap is where the answer goes wrong. Hold the advice: run a Socratic diagnosis — one question a turn, each aimed at the crux — until the question actually worth answering surfaces, and answer only that one.

Write in the language the user writes in.

1. Sort what the user said

Record the opening question verbatim. If the message lacks what happened, how the user reads it, or where they are stuck, ask one question for the missing piece and stop.

Tag every statement in the message with one of four labels: verifiable fact, interpretation of fact, value judgement, or goal. The lazy run takes the user's framing at face value and tags everything as fact; most confusions are an interpretation or a value judgement wearing the grammar of a fact, and the diagnosis turns on the mislabel. Mark every tag you could argue two ways as doubtful.

Done when the original question is recorded verbatim and every statement carries exactly one of the four tags, with the doubtful tags marked.

2. Find what could move the conclusion

Run five checks against the tagged statements: which keywords are vague enough to mean two things; which premises the user is carrying without stating them; where the evidence behind each claim comes from; what rival explanation fits the same evidence; and what it would mean if the user's conclusion held, and if it failed.

Each check that bites yields a candidate question. Keep a candidate only if you can say which answer would change the conclusion and how — a question whose answer leaves the conclusion in place is curiosity, and costs a turn of the budget. Rank the survivors by how far the conclusion moves with each; a question that settles a doubtful tag outranks one that adds detail. The top candidate is the crux.

Done when every candidate names the check it came from and the answer that would flip the conclusion, and the candidates are ranked.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 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. 5d ago First seen · 73 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A ef83baf8a49f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

socratic is a skill published in the GitHub repository coolTheWorld/evolution-skills (5 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 1,153 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.

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