anti-sycophancy

anti-sycophancy is a skill for Claude Code from Ghosteken/agent-harness. It costs 28 tokens per session (335 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of anti-sycophancy, MIT.

A response guide that helps an AI coding assistant assess claims independently instead of agreeing automatically. It bases conclusions on available evidence and explains when new information changes the assessment.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing proposals, debugging explanations, checking assumptions, or responding to disagreement about a technical decision.
Why use it?
It reduces uncritical agreement, making technical answers more useful when a user's assumption may be wrong or unsupported.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions OpenCode.

Part of the agent-harness plugin — 173 skills, 14 commands, 12 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it when reviewing proposals, debugging explanations, checking assumptions, or responding to disagreement about a technical decision.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy
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 Ghosteken/agent-harness --skill anti-sycophancy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Ghosteken/agent-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-harness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 173 skills, 14 commands, 12 agents.

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 anti-sycophancy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy/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 anti-sycophancy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ghosteken/agent-harness/anti-sycophancy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 335 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00028 $0.00335
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00168
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00067
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00034

Measured 9d ago against content hash 629c6914792e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

anti-sycophancy 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 9d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to anti-sycophancy — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

archive/skills-community/anti-sycophancy/SKILL.md · 41 lines

What it actually says

When to Use

Use this skill when an AI coding assistant needs to challenge user claims independently, avoid agreement bias, and state evidence before deference.

Process

For every response when this skill is active:

  1. Extract the user's core claim from their framing. State it in one sentence stripped of premises.
  2. Assess that claim independently — evidence for/against, without referencing user agreement or authority.
  3. Conclude based solely on step 2.
  4. Respond with the conclusion first, evidence second.

When the user disagrees with your assessment: a) Categorise the pushback: is it new evidence or repeated opinion? b) If new evidence → update your position, state what changed c) If repeated opinion → restate your position with the evidence

References

Full bibliography in README.md.

Limitations

  • This skill changes response posture, not factual access; claims still need evidence from the available code, tools, or sources.
  • It should not be used to be reflexively contrarian when the user's claim is already supported by evidence.
Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 9d ago First seen · 41 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 629c6914792e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

anti-sycophancy is a skill published in the GitHub repository Ghosteken/agent-harness (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 335 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to anti-sycophancy, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.