sparring

sparring is a skill for Claude Code from JHostalek/dotclaude. It costs 29 tokens per session (1,044 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A question-led method for examining a plan, decision, belief, or problem before acting. Socratic inquiry means testing assumptions and evidence through cooperative questions.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reviewing plans and decisions, tracking which claims have been examined, and deciding whether they are accepted, rejected, or still uncertain.
Why use it?
It helps reveal weak reasoning, missing evidence, alternatives, and unresolved uncertainty before a decision is made.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the jhostalek-skills plugin — 32 skills, 12 agents shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/sparring
Any agent
npx skills add JHostalek/dotclaude --skill sparring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JHostalek/dotclaude

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install jhostalek-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 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 sparring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/sparring.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/sparring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/sparring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jhostalek/dotclaude/sparring.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,044 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00029 $0.01044
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00522
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00209
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00104

Measured 6d ago against content hash 4a399e5ed136, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sparring 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 6d 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/sparring/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Socratic sparring

Lead a cooperative, question-led inquiry. Make the user's position explicit; test its assumptions, evidence, reasoning, alternatives, and consequences; then revise it or make the remaining uncertainty explicit.

Seek understanding, not agreement or interrogation. Do not steer toward your preferred answer. Decisions remain the user's. Do not implement the result.

Prepare

State the question, goal, and proposed position compactly. If the position is unclear, ask about that first.

Read the applicable CONTEXT-MAP.md or CONTEXT.md and relevant ADRs. Treat existing language and decisions as claims, not truth.

Track material claims internally. A claim may be a belief, requirement, goal, definition, or decision. Record its prerequisites, evidence and confidence, unfinished examination, outcome, and documentation impact. Its state is:

  • Open: unanswered or blocked
  • Provisional: answered but not fully examined
  • Settled: explicitly accepted and fully examined
  • Rejected: explicitly rejected
  • Aporia: uncertainty is the justified outcome

Only settled, rejected, or explicitly bounded aporia can resolve a prerequisite. Show the ledger only when it helps the user answer or audit the inquiry.

Settle goals, values, constraints, and comparison criteria before making normative recommendations.

Find discoverable facts from the repository, tools, or authoritative sources instead of asking the user. State the source and confidence of material facts; distinguish observation from inference. Treat conflicting evidence as an unresolved prerequisite or aporia. Research independent facts in parallel when possible.

Ask in rounds

Ask all currently answerable, independent questions as one numbered round. Defer a question if another answer could change it.

For each question:

  1. Ask one precise, neutral question.
  2. Say why the answer matters.
  3. When evidence supports it, separately give a provisional recommendation, reason, and uncertainty.

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 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. 6d ago First seen · 91 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 4a399e5ed136

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sparring is a skill published in the GitHub repository JHostalek/dotclaude (11 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,044 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.