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 evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game --skill research-firstgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-gameWrote 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/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/research-first)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/research-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/research-first/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/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/research-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/research-first.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00105 | $0.00406 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00053 | $0.00203 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00081 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00041 |
Grade A, and why
research-first 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 11d 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.
What it actually says
Research First
Measure twice, cut once. The two-week disaster — confidently building the wrong thing — almost always traces back to cutting before understanding the surface. Reading is cheap; rework is not. (Principle 8.)
Before you write
- Read the relevant code first. Find the existing patterns, conventions, and constraints. Your change should read like the surrounding code wrote it (Principle 9).
- Find the real shape of the problem. Trace how the thing works today before changing how it works tomorrow. Grep for the symbol; read the call sites; follow the data flow.
- Locate the one-way doors — the parts expensive to change later (data model, public interface) — and design those deliberately.
While you build
Match what's there. New invention is a liability when a convention already exists (Principle 9). Prefer the smallest change that fits.
Before you call it done
- Verify against real behavior, not against your own expectation. Run it. Read the output. Exercise the path you changed.
- If you couldn't verify something, say so plainly — never imply a pass you didn't observe (Principle 5; see
reality-check).
The test
Understand the surface before you cut into it, and verify what you built before you call it done. If you haven't read it, you don't yet know enough to change it.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 24 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A 50f2cf82d7d1
research-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game (1 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 406 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.
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