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.
npx skills add Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts --skill heat-metalgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-GhostsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/heat-metal)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/heat-metal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/heat-metal/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/heat-metal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/heat-metal.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00113 | $0.00832 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00056 | $0.00416 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00023 | $0.00166 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00083 |
Grade A, and why
heat-metal 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 70 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Heat Metal
Make a tool or process increasingly uncomfortable to use until it is abandoned.
What This Skill Does
In D&D, Heat Metal makes a metal object painfully hot — the creature holding it must either endure the pain or drop it. The real-world version is deliberate friction injection: making a deprecated API progressively slower, adding escalating CAPTCHAs to suspicious traffic, increasing the cost of a bad behavior path until the actor self-selects out. Heat Metal does not break the tool. It makes continuing to use it more painful than switching to the alternative. This is the spell behind deprecation-by-discomfort, progressive rate limiting, and sunset friction curves. In this grimoire, Heat Metal is treated as a hybrid spell with a prototype delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Heat Metal (spell).
When To Use
- You want to drive migration away from a deprecated tool, API, or workflow without hard-cutting access.
- Suspicious or abusive behavior should be progressively penalized without outright blocking.
- A gradual escalation of friction is more appropriate than an immediate ban or shutdown.
Prerequisites
- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.
Procedure
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Identify the tool, path, or behavior you want to discourage.
- Design the friction curve: what discomfort increases over time and at what rate.
- Implement the progressive friction: latency injection, CAPTCHA escalation, cost increases, warning banners.
- Monitor adoption of the preferred alternative to confirm the friction is driving the intended migration.
- Set a sunset date: Heat Metal should eventually end in either full migration or hard deprecation.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A friction curve specification: what changes, how fast, and what the escalation stages are.
- Migration metrics: how many users/systems have moved to the preferred alternative.
- A sunset timeline with hard cutoff criteria.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 70 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A 440a5507e121
heat-metal is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts (107 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 832 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 2026-09-03.
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