epistemic-transaction

epistemic-transaction is a skill for Claude Code from EmpiricaAI/empirica. It costs 96 tokens per session (4,246 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning method for turning complex development work into small, measured tasks. It records investigation, implementation, evidence, and results within one work period.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to break multi-file work into tasks, create implementation specifications, record goals and success criteria, and mark work complete with evidence such as commits, tests, or file paths.
Why use it?
It prevents important steps from being added after the work is finished, when they cannot be tracked honestly. It also keeps research and coding connected to observable evidence.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the TodoWrite tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the empirica plugin — 17 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to break multi-file work into tasks, create implementation specifications, record goals and success criteria, and mark work complete with evidence such as commits, tests, or file paths.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction
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 EmpiricaAI/empirica --skill epistemic-transaction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EmpiricaAI/empirica

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install empirica, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents.

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 epistemic-transaction

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction/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 epistemic-transaction

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/empiricaai/empirica/epistemic-transaction.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,246 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 214
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00096 $0.04246
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.02123
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00849
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00425

Measured 13d ago against content hash 15d0e03400f4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

epistemic-transaction scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 13d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

"grounding": "ran", "ref": "curl -H 'Authorization: ...' /health → 401 before handler log"},
empirica/plugins/claude-code-integration/skills/epistemic-transaction/SKILL.md · 379 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 379 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Epistemic Transaction Planning

Turn tasks into measured work. Investigation and implementation happen inside ONE measurement window, artifacts are recorded as you go, and learning compounds across boundaries.

PREFLIGHT → [noetic: investigate] → CHECK → [praxic: implement] → POSTFLIGHT

Use this instead of EnterPlanMode for non-trivial work.

Plan before you open

Decompose FIRST. A task added after the work is done is a self-graded checkbox, not a tracked unit.

empirica goals-create --objective "<title, ≤256>" --description "<markdown body>"
empirica goals-add-task --goal-id <ID> --description "<one unit of work>"
empirica goals-complete-task --task-id <ID> --evidence "commit abc123, tests pass"

--description is the rich body (≤8000 chars, markdown — the extension renders it). Use it for anything substantive: why this exists, success criteria, links. Title-only goals are for genuinely trivial work.

--evidence is what makes a task grounded rather than self-reported. Tie it to a commit SHA, a test result, a file path — something deterministic.

Decompose into tasks when the work spans several files, investigation precedes implementation, or it will produce ≥2 commits. Anything you would otherwise track in a TodoWrite belongs here instead, where calibration can see it.

Lifecycle verbs, all reversible — a mis-close is recoverable, so you need not be perfect at the completion boundary:

empirica goals-create --objective "Future: X" --status planned   # queued, not started
empirica goals-reopen --goal-id <ID> --reason "scope wasn't actually done"
empirica goals-archive --older-than 30 --apply    # dry-run without --apply
empirica goals-list --status completed --include-archived

Add --project-id <name-or-uuid> to log against a different project.

Sizing: bug fix or single function → 1 transaction. Feature across 2–3 files → 1–2. Cross-cutting concern → 2–3. "Redesign the system" → split further.

PREFLIGHT — open the window

Read the full file on GitHub · 379 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. 13d ago First seen · 379 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 15d0e03400f4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

epistemic-transaction is a skill published in the GitHub repository EmpiricaAI/empirica (246 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 4,246 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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