hypothesis-gen

hypothesis-gen is a skill for Claude Code from gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills. It costs 129 tokens per session (2,746 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for proposing research ideas, checking them against published papers, and keeping only ideas that are new, plausible, and testable. A research hypothesis is a specific claim that can be tested with evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps generate candidate research questions, check novelty, find supporting or related studies, identify gaps, rank ideas, and describe how to test them.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of presenting an idea that has already been established or cannot realistically be tested. Each surviving idea is connected to prior work and an intended test.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the Agent-Loop-Skills plugin — 25 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/hypothesis-gen
Any agent
npx skills add gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills --skill hypothesis-gen
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install Agent-Loop-Skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills.

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 hypothesis-gen

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/hypothesis-gen.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/hypothesis-gen)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/hypothesis-gen"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gaasher/agent-loop-skills/hypothesis-gen.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 129 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,746 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00129 $0.02746
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.01373
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00549
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00275

Measured 6d ago against content hash 3cf00a47cef4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hypothesis-gen 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 6d 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.

loops/hypothesis-gen/SKILL.md · 170 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 170 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hypothesis Generation Loop

A multi-agent, literature-grounded generation loop. The artifact is a growing pool of hypotheses; the feedback signal is the count of strong, distinct hypotheses that clear the bar — where "strong" is decided against real retrieved literature, not assertion. Each round: generate → ground → judge → keep → mutate toward the gaps, until the pool stops growing (saturation).

The discipline: a hypothesis enters the pool only if the literature says it is not already established (novelty), prior work makes it plausible (grounding), and a feasible test exists. Generating is not confirming — the output is a ranked set of strong candidates to test, each stated with how to test it.

The cast (all in roles/):

  • roles/Generator.md — proposes a batch of candidate hypotheses aimed at the open gaps.
  • roles/LiteratureScout.md — grounds each candidate in real literature (novelty · support · gap); emits litscout.json (validates schemas/litscout.schema.json).
  • roles/Judge.md — scores each against the fixed rubric and decides keep/kill/dedupe; emits verdict.json (validates schemas/verdict.schema.json).

Spawn-or-degrade. On Claude Code, spawn Generator / LiteratureScout / Judge as real Agent subagents each round; otherwise adopt each role inline in this context. You are the orchestrator.

When to use

Use when the user wants candidate hypotheses generated and vetted for a question or domain. Default: run the full generate→ground→judge loop below until saturation. Escape hatch: if the user only wants a single batch (no looping), run one round and report the kept hypotheses. Not for sharpening or decomposing a question, and not for grading an existing written proposal.

Setup

Resolve bindings interactively. If loop.run.yaml exists in the working dir, load it, confirm the values in one line, and skip to the loop. Otherwise: on Claude Code (the AskUserQuestion tool is available) infer a likely value for each binding and present it as the recommended option; on other hosts ask each as a quoted plain-text prompt. Then write loop.run.yaml (format: examples/run.example.yaml) and confirm every value plus the live/degraded literature tier before creating any other files.

Read the full file on GitHub · 170 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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.

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. 6d ago First seen · 170 lines · 129 tokens per session scan A 3cf00a47cef4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hypothesis-gen is a skill published in the GitHub repository gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills (163 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 129 tokens to every session and 2,746 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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