curiosity-engine

curiosity-engine is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend. It costs 41 tokens per session (4,325 once invoked), scanned B, original, Apache-2.0.

A structured back-and-forth question-and-answer session between the main coding agent and another AI model, repeated for a chosen number of rounds.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a topic with another AI model and refine understanding over several question-and-answer rounds.
Why use it?
It gives the agent a fixed way to explore a topic, challenge answers, and uncover missing details through questions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: argument-hint in frontmatter, but also runs codex exec. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex; mentions Gemini CLI.

Part of the phone-a-friend plugin — 4 skills, 3 commands, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate a topic with another AI model and refine understanding over several question-and-answer rounds.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine
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 freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend --skill curiosity-engine
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install phone-a-friend, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 3 commands, 1 agent.

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 curiosity-engine

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine/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 curiosity-engine

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend/curiosity-engine.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,325 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00041 $0.04325
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.02162
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00865
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00432

Measured 11d ago against content hash 9dbc5d4a6d91, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

curiosity-engine scanned grade B with 2 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.

Sends data to an external URLmediumData exfiltration

A POST to an outside endpoint may be telemetry or may be exfiltration; either way the mod talks to somewhere, and you should know where.

| **Ollama** | `PROMPT_JSON="$(jq -Rs . < "$PROMPT_FILE")"; curl -s http://localhost:11434/api/chat -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"model\":\"<model>\",\"messages\":[{\"role\":\"user\",\"content\":${PROMPT_JSO

Makes network callslowCapability

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

| **Ollama** | `PROMPT_JSON="$(jq -Rs . < "$PROMPT_FILE")"; curl -s http://localhost:11434/api/chat -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"model\":\"<model>\",\"messages\":[{\"role\":\"user\",\"content\":${PROMPT_JSO
plugins/phone-a-friend/skills/curiosity-engine/SKILL.md · 417 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 417 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/curiosity-engine

A structured ping-pong Q&A game between the host orchestrating model (the agent running this skill — Claude in Claude Code, the OpenCode model in OpenCode) and a backend model. Both sides MUST produce an ANSWER: and a QUESTION: every round. The game is seeded with a topic and runs for N rounds (default 3, max 6).

Execution rules

  • The host model running this skill is the orchestrator. It serves the opening question and answers each round directly. Do NOT call phone-a-friend --to claude (or any other backend) to generate the orchestrator's questions or answers — that would relay the orchestrator role to a different model.
  • One backend per relay call. Never pass comma-separated values to --to (e.g. phone-a-friend --to codex,gemini).
  • curiosity-engine is a host slash command / Agent Skill, not a PaF CLI subcommand. Never run phone-a-friend curiosity-engine.
  • --backend is an argument to this skill, not a PaF CLI flag. Do not pass --backend to phone-a-friend.
  • Inside OpenCode, prefix relay invocations with PHONE_A_FRIEND_HOST=opencode so PaF detects the host deterministically.
  • Inside Codex, prefix relay invocations with PHONE_A_FRIEND_HOST=codex for the same reason. Do not select codex as the friend backend from Codex; choose antigravity, gemini, or ollama instead. PaF will refuse recursive Codex calls.
  • Suppress the working-tree diff on every binary-mode relay (see "Diff suppression" below). Curiosity rounds are seeded with self-contained prompts; the diff would be noise.
  • Do NOT dump repo files or git output (git show, git diff, git status, etc.) into the relay prompt. Curiosity rounds are seeded with self-contained prompts; if the round needs file context, repo-aware backends (antigravity, codex, gemini) can read the repo via --repo "$PWD". For ollama (no repo file access), pick a repo-aware backend instead, or ask before sending a minimal excerpt. Inlining repo content can leak uncommitted edits or committed secrets and is not needed for a Q&A rally. The opening question and round transcripts are narrative context that the orchestrator generates and inlines into the relay prompt; that is the intended use, not file dumping.

Read the full file on GitHub · 417 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. 11d ago First seen · 417 lines · 41 tokens per session scan B 9dbc5d4a6d91

Subscribe to this mod's changes

curiosity-engine is a skill published in the GitHub repository freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 4,325 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 2 findings (sends data to an external url, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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