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 jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill apply-dependency-trapgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-coreWrote 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/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-dependency-trap)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-dependency-trap"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-dependency-trap/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/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-dependency-trap"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-dependency-trap.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 | $0.00041 | $0.02495 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00998 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00499 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00249 |
Grade A, and why
apply-dependency-trap 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 1mo 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 — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Apply Dependency Trap
Offer genuine, unconstrained value during an adoption phase that accumulates switching costs naturally — then shift to monetisation once the dependency makes alternatives costly to pursue.
Why This Is Best Practice
Origin: Stratagem #16 of the Thirty-Six Stratagems: "In order to capture, first let it go" (欲擒故縱). In the original military context: when an enemy is fleeing, pursue them too hard and they will fight with the desperation of a cornered force; let them go and they relax, then capture them on your terms. In business: present the customer with a free and unconstrained adoption path; let dependency accumulate; capture them when switching becomes costlier than staying.
Adopted by: The dependency trap is the mechanism behind the most successful platform and software growth models of the past two decades. Slack offered unlimited free messaging until teams were deeply dependent on channels, integrations, and message history — then introduced pricing for large teams. Dropbox offered 2GB free, let users build years of file dependencies, then monetised through storage tiers. HashiCorp open-sourced Terraform and Vault, built a global infrastructure automation community, then introduced enterprise features that the most dependent users — enterprises — needed. Shapiro and Varian's Information Rules (1999) formalised the economics: lock-in is created by switching costs, and switching costs accumulate through use, data, integrations, and trained habits.
Impact: Premature monetisation — presenting pricing before the customer has experienced value — is the most common early failure mode in platform and SaaS businesses. The customer's cost-benefit calculation before dependency is unfavourable: they bear the switching cost from their current solution without yet experiencing the dependency value that will make future switching painful. The dependency trap delays monetisation until the switching cost calculation runs the other way.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 116 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 6437b047c88a
apply-dependency-trap is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,495 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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