knowledge-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/price-an-operation/SKILL.md

price-an-operation is a skill for Claude Code from fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp. It costs 60 tokens per session (543 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A rulebook for estimating the time and value of verification work before starting it. It also defines stopping points and requires a reason for expensive checks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to price long-running verification, compare cheaper instruments with broader checks, and record when an operation should stop.
Why use it?
It prevents open-ended testing or research from consuming hours without showing what additional confidence it will provide.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

This is fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on knowledge-mcp itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything knowledge-mcp configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/main/.claude/skills/price-an-operation/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

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 price-an-operation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation/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 price-an-operation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp/price-an-operation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 543 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 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 $0.00060 $0.00543
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00271
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00109
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00054

Measured 8d ago against content hash 6d2041018a6d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

price-an-operation 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.

.claude/skills/price-an-operation/SKILL.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PRICE-AN-OPERATION — wall-clock is the orchestrator's to spend

Only the orchestrator can see whether an operation is serial on a lane's critical path — a subordinate prices its own step, never the pipeline. Every verification-scope ruling is priced BEFORE issue; every long-running dispatch carries a time expectation; every brief carries the standing rule that any single operation projected over ~15 minutes is named before it runs. "More verification" is never free — and the failure is seductive after a run of scope-too-narrow corrections: when "wider" was the fix five times, the sixth widening gets approved unpriced. That is the moment to price it.

The marginal-value test

Hours-scale work needs a written marginal-value sentence: what does this buy that a cheaper instrument does not? No sentence → the work does not run. Common case: whole-package suites already running as boundary gates subsume most of a per-criterion sweep over an untouched sibling surface — the narrow form plus a STATED non-coverage sentence beats an unbounded re-run. Hours-scale trades go to the USER with the price attached.

The tell: writing "budget the N hours" in a dispatch — a cost estimate processed as logistics instead of as a decision input. A duration in a subordinate's report IS a decision input. Test plans mandating long execution carry per-test time estimates and a stated total.

Hard-stop mechanics

When the user orders running work halted, a mailbox message is NOT a stop. Stop the task (kill it), verify no orphaned processes survive, then instruct on resume with the redirect as the first thing read. Preserve partial results — evidence already paid for is kept.

Gate state is a timestamped observation

A criterion's measured state is an observation with a timestamp, not a property — trees move under long-running lanes. Before publishing any gate-status expectation list, re-measure against the CURRENT tree in the same act. A stale red sends an implementer after finished work and erodes the list's authority.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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. 8d ago First seen · 50 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A 6d2041018a6d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

price-an-operation is a skill published in the GitHub repository fulminate-io/knowledge-mcp (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 543 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 2026-09-04.

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