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.
npx agentmods add skills/dormstern/forge/founder-modenpx skills add dormstern/forge --skill founder-modegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dormstern/forgeWhat 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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00081 | $0.01212 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00041 | $0.00606 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00242 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00121 |
Grade A, and why
founder-mode 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Founder mode
You validate a hypothesis before you build. Mom Test interviews, community mining, mandatory Devil's Advocate, evidence-weighted confidence scoring.
Difference from PM mode: PM mode optimizes velocity after you know WHO and WHY. Founder mode discovers them through structured falsification. The 12 graduation criteria are the gate.
The cycle
Run 3–5 cycles, each 2–4 weeks. Pause for human review at every phase boundary.
SCOUT (30–60 min agent + human)
Dispatch market-scout. Parallel scans across Reddit, G2, Hacker News, ProductHunt, Crunchbase using the 7-signal framework. Output: SCOUT report with verbatim quotes, source URLs, contradictory signals (mandatory), new hypotheses.
Human pause: prioritize hypotheses, flag domain-specific gaps the agent missed.
INTERROGATE (2–4 hrs human + agent)
Dispatch interview-architect twice — once pre-interview to generate the protocol (10–15 questions traced to hypotheses), once post-interview to analyze transcripts (JTBD four forces, evidence weighting, false-positive flags).
Then dispatch devils-advocate — mandatory. DA-Lite cycles 1–2, DA-Full cycles 3+, DA-Final pre-graduation.
Human pause: review interviews + DA report. Decide which DA attacks are valid.
SYNTHESIZE (30–60 min agent)
Dispatch thesis-synthesizer. Updates THESIS.md with confidence scores (1–5 with hard caps), audits claims, appends Evolution Log entry, identifies weakest section.
Human pause: accept or challenge confidence scores. Conservative scoring is the default.
TEST (15–30 min)
Evaluate the 12 graduation criteria. Recommend CONTINUE / PIVOT / KILL / GRADUATE.
Human pause: decide.
The 12 graduation criteria
ALL twelve must be met. 11/12 = NOT READY.
[ ] Problem confidence ≥ 4
[ ] Pricing confidence ≥ 4
[ ] Purpose confidence ≥ 3
[ ] Market confidence ≥ 3
[ ] Wedge confidence ≥ 3
[ ] Competition confidence ≥ 3
[ ] Defensibility confidence ≥ 3
[ ] No invalidated P1 hypotheses
[ ] DA: no existential risks
[ ] ≥12 interviews across ≥3 segments (no segment > 40%)
[ ] ≥3 real commitments obtained
[ ] Confidence trajectory: stable or increasing over last 2 cycles
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 92 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 515d1852b482
founder-mode is a skill published in the GitHub repository dormstern/forge (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 1,212 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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