hypnotic-pattern

hypnotic-pattern is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts. It costs 62 tokens per session (640 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A design guide for keeping people oriented and engaged during bounded experiences such as loading screens, onboarding, and multi-step flows.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to improve loading animations, progress indicators, onboarding sequences, and other flows where users may lose focus.
Why use it?
It helps explain where users lose attention and choose visual cues or progress feedback that keep them moving without relying on endless engagement.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to improve loading animations, progress indicators, onboarding sequences, and other flows where users may lose focus.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern
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 Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts --skill hypnotic-pattern
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 hypnotic-pattern

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern/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 hypnotic-pattern

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hmbown/wizards-of-the-ghosts/hypnotic-pattern.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 640 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 $0.00062 $0.00640
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00320
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00128
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00064

Measured 7d ago against content hash 3e558fe5e3b9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hypnotic-pattern 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 7d 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.

generated/hermes/influence-and-behavior/hypnotic-pattern/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hypnotic Pattern

Design attention-capture patterns that hold focus in a bounded context.

What This Skill Does

Hypnotic Pattern mesmerizes everyone who looks at it. The real-world version is attention design: loading animations, progress indicators, onboarding flows, and visual patterns that keep users oriented and engaged during a bounded experience. The line between helpful focus and addictive capture is the central design tension. In this grimoire, Hypnotic Pattern is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Hypnotic Pattern (spell).

When To Use

  • A flow, onboarding sequence, or presentation needs better attention-holding mechanics.
  • Users are dropping off during a multi-step process and you need to understand why and how to keep them.

Prerequisites

  • No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure

  1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
  2. Identify the experience and its attention drop-off points.
  3. Design engagement patterns: progress indicators, micro-rewards, curiosity gaps, or visual anchors.
  4. Map the boundary: when should the pattern release attention? Hypnotic Pattern has a duration, not an infinity.
  5. Deliver the attention design with an explicit note on where engagement becomes compulsion.
  6. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

  • Attention-capture patterns tailored to the specific flow or experience.
  • A boundary specification: when the pattern should deliberately release the user's attention.

Pitfalls / Guardrails

  • Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
  • Distinguish attention-capture from addiction mechanics. This spell has a duration — it is not designed to hold attention indefinitely.
  • Refuse infinite scroll, autoplay-without-end, or engagement patterns designed to prevent the user from leaving.

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 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. 7d ago First seen · 65 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 3e558fe5e3b9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hypnotic-pattern 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 62 tokens to every session and 640 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 2026-09-03.

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