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 ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill idea-refinementgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harnessWrote 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/ericrisco/rsc-harness/idea-refinement)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/idea-refinement"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/idea-refinement/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/ericrisco/rsc-harness/idea-refinement"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/idea-refinement.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
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 73 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.
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 | $0.00065 | $0.01337 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00032 | $0.00668 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00013 | $0.00267 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00134 |
Grade A, and why
idea-refinement 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
idea-refinement — make the idea earn its direction
Use this before specify, while the question is still “which version of this idea is worth pursuing?” The output is not a backlog or a polished pitch. It is a short decision brief that widens the option space, exposes what is merely assumed, and recommends the cheapest sensible direction to test.
Inspect any brief, notes, product or repository already supplied before asking questions. Ask one question at a time only when the answer would change the option space. The user may delegate a choice; “use your judgment” is valid authority when the decision is reversible and the assumptions are made visible.
The refinement loop
FRAME → DIVERGE → CHALLENGE → CONVERGE → TEST
1. FRAME the real opportunity
Write five lines, no solution language yet:
- Actor: who is struggling, in what situation?
- Current workaround: what do they do now, including “do nothing”?
- Desired progress: what observable change would make this useful?
- Constraints: time, money, channel, trust, regulation, existing product.
- Known / assumed: separate evidence already seen from hypotheses that only sound plausible.
If the idea is phrased as a feature (“an AI dashboard”), reframe it as a problem and outcome (“operators need to spot failed jobs before customers report them”). Keep the original idea as one candidate, not as the conclusion.
2. DIVERGE deliberately
Produce five to eight meaningfully different directions. Variants that only change colors, names, pricing tiers or implementation technology count as one direction.
Choose two lenses that attack the largest uncertainty:
- Remove / replace / combine / reverse: change the mechanism, not the wording.
- Job and workaround: improve, automate or eliminate the thing people already do.
- Constraint inversion: assume the budget, time, data or integration is unavailable.
- Trust ladder: begin with advice, then approval, then automation; do not jump to full autonomy.
- Pre-mortem: imagine the idea failed in six months and design away the most likely cause.
- Narrow wedge: find the smallest audience and moment where the pain is strongest.
What ships with it
2 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.
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.
- 8d ago First seen · 122 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A b61c80134ec4
idea-refinement is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (82 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 1,337 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 2026-09-03.
Other skills, from other repositories
merge-aliases
Folds two surface names for the same backend system into one canonical entity, keeping every original mention individually retrievable, and refuses to merge pairs that only share spelling.
anchor-and-lock
Consults a check that sits outside the loop system before finalizing any decision the frozen facts bear on, and refuses every attempt by a loop to rewrite a node marked frozen, regardless of how convergent the loop's own reasoning looks.
query-graph
Loads schema.sql into a local SQLite file, then answers availability and provenance questions against the nodes/edges tables with real SQL instead of re-reading source material.
build-subgraph
Traverses a full graph and returns a bounded subgraph around one target node -- its depth-bounded dependencies plus any disputed claims attached to it -- while proving everything else was left out.
arbitrate-collision
Detects when two loops have proposed conflicting writes to the same node and field at close to the same time, applies a stated priority rule to accept exactly one, and records the rejected write with the reason it lost.
audit-sweep
Reviews a full set of the main loop's outputs together, from a wider vantage than any single one of them, looking specifically for cross-item patterns that a one-item-at-a-time loop is structurally unable to notice.