probe

probe is a skill for Claude Code from digital-stoic-org/agent-skills. It costs 69 tokens per session (1,401 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A two-stage process for trying a small, safe experiment when the result of a complex situation cannot be predicted in advance. It first defines the hypothesis and limits, then runs the experiment and studies the result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test a hypothesis, explore a complex technical problem, or run a reversible trial and assess the patterns that emerge.
Why use it?
It helps you learn from uncertain changes without treating an experiment as proof or making a large commitment too early.

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 to test a hypothesis, explore a complex technical problem, or run a reversible trial and assess the patterns that emerge.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/probe
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 probe
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 probe

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/probe.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/probe)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/probe"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/probe.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,401 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 5
    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 $0.00069 $0.01401
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00700
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00280
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00140

Measured 8d ago against content hash 828ad2ec3ae3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

probe 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • probe — 89% identical, 94 lines differ
cognitive/skills/probe/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Probe

Safe-to-fail experiment in Complex domain. Cause-effect only visible in retrospect — probe to sense patterns, not to prove.

Probing: $ARGUMENTS

Check for handoff context: if $ARGUMENTS references a probe-to-probe-llm.md file, load it before Phase 1 — carried context accelerates qualification.

⚠️ 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.

Phase 1: Qualify (foreground — MANDATORY)

ENTRY GATE: Phase 2 does not start until Phase 1 is complete. No bypass path exists.

1.1 Parse hypothesis

Extract from $ARGUMENTS or handoff context:

  • Hypothesis statement (what you believe might be true)
  • Enabling constraints already known (carry forward from prior cycles — do NOT rediscover)
  • Confirm/refute criteria already defined (carry forward, update if refined)

If no hypothesis present: AskUserQuestion — ask user to state the hypothesis. Do not proceed without one.

1.2 Identify enabling constraints

Bounds without prescribing path:

  • Scope: time, access, reversibility boundary
  • Immutable: production systems, data integrity, user-facing state
  • Variable: what can be freely changed within experiment

Carry forward from prior cycles unchanged unless explicitly updated.

1.3 Define confirm/refute criteria

Before running: define observable signals. For each criterion:

  • Confirmed: observable evidence that supports the hypothesis
  • Refuted: observable evidence that contradicts the hypothesis
  • Surprise: unexpected result that suggests a different hypothesis

Criteria must be defined before Phase 2 executes. Gate on this.

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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. 8d ago First seen · 134 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 828ad2ec3ae3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

probe is a skill published in the GitHub repository digital-stoic-org/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 1,401 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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