experiment

experiment is a skill for Claude Code from digital-stoic-org/agent-skills. It costs 54 tokens per session (849 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A controlled process for situations where the cause and effect are unclear, such as a novel problem or a severe production incident. It uses a small action, observes what happens, and then decides what to try next.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it during crises with unclear causes, unfamiliar technical failures, or deliberate experiments where normal best practices do not apply.
Why use it?
When logs and familiar methods do not explain the problem, making one limited change can provide useful information without running an uncontrolled series of actions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the cognitive plugin — 8 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it during crises with unclear causes, unfamiliar technical failures, or deliberate experiments where normal best practices do not apply.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment
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 digital-stoic-org/agent-skills --skill experiment
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cognitive, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 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 experiment

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment/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 experiment

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/experiment.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 849 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 8
    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 $0.00054 $0.00849
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.00425
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00170
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00085

Measured 8d ago against content hash 3bafe501168b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

experiment 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 8d 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.

cognitive/skills/experiment/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Experiment

Act → sense → gate. Human IS the constraint. No autonomous runs.

Situation: $ARGUMENTS

⚠️ AskUserQuestion Guard

CRITICAL: After EVERY AskUserQuestion call, check if answers are empty/blank. Known Claude Code bug: outside Plan Mode, AskUserQuestion silently returns empty answers without showing UI.

If answers are empty: DO NOT proceed with assumptions. Instead:

  1. Output: "⚠️ Questions didn't display (known Claude Code bug outside Plan Mode)."
  2. Present the options as a numbered text list and ask user to reply with their choice number.
  3. WAIT for user reply before continuing.

0. Classify Chaos

AskUserQuestion — single call:

"Accidental or deliberate?"

  • Accidental (crisis): something broke badly — production down, data corruption, cascading failure → faster gates
  • Deliberate (innovation): intentional disruption — novel architecture, paradigm shift, no prior art → exploratory gates

Set mode = accidental|deliberate.

1. Frame the Void

State what is NOT known (not what is known):

  • No visible cause-effect relationships
  • No best practice applies
  • No expert can say "do X"

Identify: what is the minimal safe action to impose ANY constraint on this space?

2. Act-Gate Loop

Repeat until structure emerges or transition triggered:

Act

  • Propose ONE minimal action (smallest possible intervention)
  • State expected signal: "if this works, we'll see X"
  • isolation: worktree for containment if code changes involved

Gate

AskUserQuestion: "Ready to act? Describe outcome after: [action]"

Wait for human response. Gate fires after EVERY action — no batching.

Sense

Interpret the response:

  • Signal received → update constraint map
  • No signal → action was too small or wrong dimension
  • Negative signal → constraint hardened in wrong direction

Log: action N: [what] → [outcome] → [constraint discovered]

3. Structure Check

After each gate, assess:

Constraint type now:
- Still absent → continue act-gate loop
- Enabling (patterns visible) → TRANSITION to /probe
- Governing (experts applicable) → skip /probe → /frame-problem → /investigate
- Rigid (process known) → skip /probe → /frame-problem → execute
- Misclassified → TRANSITION to /frame-problem

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 8d ago First seen · 102 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 3bafe501168b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

experiment is a skill published in the GitHub repository digital-stoic-org/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 849 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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