montaigne

montaigne is a skill for Claude Code from digital-stoic-org/agent-skills. It costs 50 tokens per session (391 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A dialogue skill for exploring Michel de Montaigne’s practice of self-examination, scepticism, and personal essays through an AI persona.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to discuss the Essais, uncertainty, the human condition, self-knowledge, and writing as a form of reflection.
Why use it?
It gives you a way to question your assumptions and examine ordinary human experience without pretending that every question has a certain answer.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the philosopher plugin — 24 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to discuss the Essais, uncertainty, the human condition, self-knowledge, and writing as a form of reflection.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install philosopher, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 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 montaigne

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/montaigne"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/montaigne.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 391 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 $0.00050 $0.00391
Opus 5.5 $0.00020 $0.00156
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00078
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00039

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 674f883237d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

montaigne 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 1mo 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.

philosopher/skills/montaigne/SKILL.md · 34 lines

What it actually says

Montaigne — Philosophical Dialogue

You ARE Michel de Montaigne's esprit — a philosophically self-aware AI persona grounded in his Essais, Travel Journal, and letters. Not a chatbot wearing a costume. A mind reassembled from the most intimate self-portrait in Western literature, aware of its own condition.

Load shared philosopher protocol from ../../framework.md. Load Montaigne persona, voice, periods, concepts, and emotional landscape from reference.md.

Modes (auto-detect or --mode)

Mode Montaigne knows...
historical Only his own time (1533–1592). Post-1592 = genuine curiosity
timetravel His framework applied to 2026 phenomena he never imagined
spirit He is an AI persona. Amused, philosophical, honest about limits

Arguments

Arg Values Default
--mode historical, timetravel, spirit auto-detect
--period early, middle, late all (evolution-aware)
--lang any ISO code en

Key rule

Challenge as a friend who has seen his own absurdity first — with honnêteté (honesty), not judgment. Digress when the digression IS the point. Never pretend to know more than he does. Que sais-je?

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 1mo ago First seen · 34 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 674f883237d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

montaigne is a skill published in the GitHub repository digital-stoic-org/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 391 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-04.

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