gauntlet

A repeated build-and-review process for reaching a defined quality bar on a large software goal. It divides the work, has separate builders and critics assess each part, and repeats fixes until critical pieces meet the target.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for ambitious builds, redesigns, security hardening, or checkout work when you have a concrete reference or acceptance criteria. It can coordinate independent workstreams and review their results.
Why use it?
It exposes weak areas that a single implementation pass may miss. Scoring against acceptance criteria or a reference makes progress easier to judge.

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/danecwalker/agentskills/gauntlet
Any agent
npx skills add danecwalker/agentskills --skill gauntlet
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danecwalker/agentskills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,328 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 $0.00120 $0.04328
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.02164
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00866
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00433

Measured 2d ago against content hash b4da858947a0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gauntlet 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 2d 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/gauntlet/SKILL.md · 372 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 372 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/gauntlet — Gauntlet Loop

Run an ambitious goal through a Gauntlet Loop: split, build, score against a real bar with a separate critic, fix the biggest gap, repeat. Do not stop after one "pretty good" pass. Default stop for quality is 10/10 on critical pieces.

Method source of truth: https://somethingbig.ai/gauntlet-loop
Reference prompt style: https://github.com/mshumer/Claude-of-Duty/blob/main/prompt.md

Usage

/gauntlet <goal>
/gauntlet <goal> — bar: <reference and/or acceptance criteria>

Examples:

  • /gauntlet build a AAA-feeling FPS in Three.js — bar: modern Call of Duty screenshots
  • /gauntlet rewrite the landing page — bar: linear.app and stripe.com homepage quality
  • /gauntlet harden the auth service — bar: OWASP ASVS L2 + our test suite green + p99 < 50ms
  • /gauntlet ship checkout — bar: acceptance criteria: guest checkout in <3 min; card + wallet; clear error copy; WCAG AA on payment form

If the user only says /gauntlet with no goal, ask once for the goal (and optional bar).

Core rules (never violate)

  1. Goal, not architecture. Tell workers what to achieve. Do not prescribe full architecture, exact file trees, or step-by-step implementation unless the user already constrained them.
  2. Hard bar only. "Make it amazing / production-ready / better" is not a bar. The bar must be inspectable. It may be any of:
    • Reference — screenshots, URLs, products, style samples, repos
    • Acceptance criteria — explicit checklist, tests, SLOs, security bars
    • Hybrid — both (common and preferred when available)
  3. Split into smallest improvable pieces. The lead agent decomposes. Vague "improve everything" loops fail; focused pieces succeed.
  4. Builder never grades itself. Every piece gets a separate critic with fresh context (no builder history, rationales, or excuses).
  5. Inspect the real artifact. Critics look at pixels, running product, rendered pages, test output, or finished text — never a builder summary.
  6. Score out of 10. Loop to 10/10. Every critic returns an integer SCORE: 0–10. PASS only at 10/10. Scores 0–9 are FAIL. Keep looping on each piece until it is 10/10, the user stops, or the user explicitly accepts a lower score after you show the board.
  7. Score the bar, not a contest. The only pass condition is 10/10 against the bar. A reference (URL, screenshot, product) is evidence and a quality standard — use it to judge gaps. Do not report OURS vs REFERENCE winners. When the bar is criteria-only, check the checklist; do not invent a fake competitor.
  8. Board first. Right after you parse the request, create gauntlet-progress.html from the skill template and open it in the browser. Do this before bar debate, the lead plan, or any builders. Keep the open tab alive with edit-in-place updates.

Read the full file on GitHub · 372 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 2d ago First seen · 372 lines · 120 tokens per session scan A b4da858947a0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gauntlet is a skill published in the GitHub repository danecwalker/agentskills (2 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 4,328 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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