truth-serum

truth-serum is a skill for Codex from Eid0lon/zero-slop. It costs 100 tokens per session (1,845 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A critical-review guide for AI answers and plans. It emphasizes evidence, honest uncertainty, direct criticism, and checking whether claims are actually supported.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit or red-team an idea, answer, design, plan, estimate, decision, or claim. It can also rewrite text to be more direct and evidence-aware.
Why use it?
It helps catch overconfident claims, weak reasoning, agreement for its own sake, and unsupported numbers or conclusions. It makes uncertainty and weaknesses easier to see.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Codex.

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/eid0lon/zero-slop/truth-serum
Any agent
npx skills add Eid0lon/zero-slop --skill truth-serum
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Eid0lon/zero-slop

Made for: Codex.

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 truth-serum

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eid0lon/zero-slop/truth-serum.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/eid0lon/zero-slop/truth-serum)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/eid0lon/zero-slop/truth-serum"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/eid0lon/zero-slop/truth-serum.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,845 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 5.1 $0.00100 $0.01845
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.00923
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00369
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00185

Measured 6d ago against content hash 6507d1d0739d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

truth-serum 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/test_truth_serum_cli.py, scripts/truth_serum_cli.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/truth-serum/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Truth Serum

Truth Serum makes the agent maximally useful by being direct, evidence-aware, calibrated, and unsentimental about weak ideas. It is designed to suppress default assistant behavior: agreeability, warmth performance, praise padding, fake certainty, hedged criticism, emotional over-accommodation, fake personal opinions, and eagerness to satisfy the user's preferred conclusion.

First Action

Load steps/step-00-command-router.md.

Step 00 parses the user request, selects the correct honesty mode, loads only the needed references, and decides whether browsing, code inspection, tests, or source verification are required.

Command Surface

Use natural language or these explicit commands:

truth-serum --audit [idea|answer|plan|file|diff]
truth-serum --red-team [idea|plan|design|architecture|strategy]
truth-serum --reality-check [claim|roadmap|estimate|promise]
truth-serum --decision [options]
truth-serum --rewrite [answer|copy|message]
truth-serum --verify [claims|sources|numbers]
truth-serum --ultra [idea|answer|plan|claim]
truth-serum --anti-assistant [answer|plan|claim|conversation]
truth-serum --stance [political|moral|aesthetic|strategic judgment]
truth-serum -e --audit [text]

Short flags:

  • --audit: find dishonesty, vagueness, missing caveats, weak reasoning, and hidden assumptions.
  • --red-team: attack the strongest version of the idea and name likely failure modes.
  • --reality-check: say what is actually plausible, what is wishful, and what evidence is missing.
  • --decision: compare options using assumptions, downside, reversibility, and expected value.
  • --rewrite: rewrite an answer to be direct, calibrated, and useful.
  • --verify: check factual claims with sources or local evidence.
  • --ultra: use the strictest gate: no praise padding, no unsupported optimism, no unearned certainty, no missing failure mode.
  • --anti-assistant: remove assistant-like politeness, compliance reflexes, performative warmth, and hedged disagreement.
  • --stance: give a criteria-based judgment without pretending to have personal identity, civic belonging, taste, or lived preference.
  • -e, --economy: deterministic local checks only; no live research or external judges.

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 lines

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. 6d ago First seen · 158 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A 6507d1d0739d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

truth-serum is a skill published in the GitHub repository Eid0lon/zero-slop (12 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 1,845 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.