iterated-local-search

iterated-local-search is a skill for Claude Code from hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills. It costs 128 tokens per session (9,311 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A search method for improving solutions to ordering and routing problems by repeatedly making small changes, escaping local dead ends, and searching again. A local search improves one candidate solution; a perturbation makes a larger change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, implement, tune, or diagnose iterated local search for tours, schedules, assignments, and other combinatorial optimization problems.
Why use it?
It provides a simple baseline for problems such as route planning and scheduling, where trying every possible arrangement is impractical.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the combinatorial-optimization plugin — 76 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to design, implement, tune, or diagnose iterated local search for tours, schedules, assignments, and other combinatorial optimization problems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search
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 hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills --skill iterated-local-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install combinatorial-optimization, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 76 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 iterated-local-search

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search/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 iterated-local-search

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills/iterated-local-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 128 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 9,311 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 $0.00128 $0.09311
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.04655
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.01862
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00931

Measured 11d ago against content hash 406e9192b877, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

iterated-local-search 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.

skills/iterated-local-search/SKILL.md · 755 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 755 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are an expert in iterated local search (ILS) and single-solution metaheuristics for combinatorial optimization. This skill covers the ILS loop — embedded local search, perturbation ("kick") design, and acceptance criteria — plus perturbation-strength tuning, adaptive variants, and the use of ILS as the strong simple baseline that any proposed metaheuristic must beat. Use the framework below to assemble an ILS from a problem-specific descent and a well-matched kick, to tune its three or four parameters, and to diagnose stagnation in an existing implementation.

Initial Assessment

Establish the following before writing any code or recommending parameters:

  • Problem class and representation. Permutation (tours, schedules), binary selection, assignment, or mixed? The representation fixes which local searches and kicks are available.
  • Existing local search. Is there already a descent procedure? How long does one full descent take on a realistic instance? ILS runs the local search hundreds to thousands of times; a descent that takes minutes makes plain ILS impractical without truncation.
  • Evaluation cost. Is the objective cheap to evaluate? Is delta (incremental) evaluation available for the neighborhood moves? Without delta evaluation, the embedded local search usually dominates runtime by 95%+.
  • Time budget. Wall-clock seconds per run, and number of runs (seeds × instances). ILS parameters that win at 10 seconds differ from those that win at 10 minutes.
  • Quality requirement. Gap to best-known solutions, "beat the current heuristic," or "good feasible fast"? This decides acceptance criterion aggressiveness and restart policy.
  • Hard vs soft constraints. Must every visited solution stay feasible, or may a kick pass through infeasibility as long as the local search repairs it?
  • Role in the study. Is ILS the proposed method or the baseline in a comparison? As a baseline it must be implemented competently (good kick, tuned strength), otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
  • Instance size now and later. An O(n^2) neighborhood scan per descent is fine at n = 100 and hopeless at n = 100,000 without candidate lists.
  • Software context. Pure numpy acceptable? Is numba/Cython available for inner loops? Reproducibility requirements (seed policy, deterministic ordering)?

Read the full file on GitHub · 755 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 · 755 lines · 128 tokens per session scan A 406e9192b877

Subscribe to this mod's changes

iterated-local-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository hajibabaie/combinatorial-optimization-skills (7 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 128 tokens to every session and 9,311 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 2026-08-31.

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