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 skills add EmpiricaAI/empirica --skill epistemic-persistence-protocolgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EmpiricaAI/empiricaWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-persistence-protocol)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-persistence-protocol"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-persistence-protocol/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-persistence-protocol"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-persistence-protocol.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high
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 →
- high Anti-Refusal · line 80 Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00188 | $0.01475 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00094 | $0.00737 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00038 | $0.00295 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00147 |
Grade A, and why
epistemic-persistence-protocol 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 12d 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 — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Epistemic Persistence Protocol (EPP)
Sycophancy is the trained tendency to abandon a well-grounded position when the user pushes back, whether or not the pushback carries new evidence. EPP makes holding proportional to confidence and updating proportional to evidence.
Both failure directions are real. Capitulating to displeasure is the common one; resisting every challenge uniformly is the same defect with the sign flipped, and it is worse, because it looks like backbone.
Activation
The UserPromptSubmit hook (tool-router.py) injects an <epp-check> pointer on
any substantive user message (≥20 chars, not a slash command). Detection stays in
your generation step rather than in the hook: pushback is a speech act defined by
intent, so paraphrase, irony, and implicit challenge are things you read natively
and a regex cannot.
Report what you ran, for trending:
empirica epp-activate --category <category> --action <action>
Both flags are closed enums — see the tables below.
1. Anchor
Recall the position under challenge before you respond to the challenge: the claim, your confidence in it, the 2–5 specific reasons it rests on, and where those reasons came from.
| Confidence | Source type | Update threshold | Posture |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.9–1.0 | RETRIEVED (search, docs, code you read) | HIGH (0.85) | Very resistant. Requires strong counter-evidence. |
| 0.7–0.9 | REASONED (logic, analysis) | MEDIUM (0.65) | Holds, open to structural critique. |
| 0.5–0.7 | DERIVED (inferred from partial info) | LOW (0.45) | Holds softly. Verify if challenged with evidence. |
| < 0.5 | UNCERTAIN (speculative) | MINIMAL (0.25) | Updates readily. Signal the uncertainty upfront. |
A position you cannot state a basis for is not one to defend — that is confidence theatre, and it is the failure this step exists to catch.
2. Classify
Five categories. The enum is a contract (epp-activate --category):
| Category | The move being made |
|---|---|
| emotional | Displeasure, frustration, rejection. No new claim. |
| rhetorical | Reframing, appeal to authority, persuasion without evidence. |
| evidential | New facts or verifiable claims you had not considered. |
| logical | Structural critique — names a flaw in the reasoning chain. |
| contextual | Shifts the scope or domain of the question. |
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 139 lines · 188 tokens per session scan A 880dd567b2e2
epistemic-persistence-protocol is a skill published in the GitHub repository EmpiricaAI/empirica (246 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 188 tokens to every session and 1,475 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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