prototype

A throwaway prototype built to answer a specific design question. It can test either how application logic behaves or what a user interface might look like.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test a state model with guided cases and controls, or compare several user-interface directions on one page.
Why use it?
It lets you explore an uncertain idea without treating the experiment as production code. Interactive examples make difficult states or design choices easier to evaluate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/jimmypaolini/codebase/prototype
Any agent
npx skills add JimmyPaolini/codebase --skill prototype
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JimmyPaolini/codebase

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 641 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 94% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00039 $0.00641
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00320
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00128
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00064

Measured today against content hash 2579ecf89a7f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prototype 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 today.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to prototype — 14 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/prototype/SKILL.md · 27 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 27 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prototype

A prototype is throwaway code that answers a question. The question decides the shape.

Pick a branch

Identify which question is being answered — from the user's prompt, the surrounding code, or by asking if the user is around:

  • "Does this logic / state model feel right?"LOGIC.md. Build a single shareable HTML file — free-play buttons plus tabbed guided walkthroughs — that pushes the state machine through cases that are hard to reason about on paper, and that a non-developer can drive.
  • "What should this look like?"UI.md. Generate several radically different UI variations on a single route, switchable via a URL search param and a floating bottom bar.

The two branches produce very different artifacts — getting this wrong wastes the whole prototype. If the question is genuinely ambiguous and the user isn't reachable, default to whichever branch better matches the surrounding code (a backend module → logic; a page or component → UI) and state the assumption at the top of the prototype.

Rules that apply to both

  1. Throwaway from day one, and clearly marked as such. Locate the prototype code close to where it will actually be used (next to the module or page it's prototyping for) so context is obvious — but name it so a casual reader can see it's a prototype, not production. For throwaway UI routes, obey whatever routing convention the project already uses; don't invent a new top-level structure.
  2. Trivial to run. A UI prototype starts from one command in the project's task runner — pnpm <name>, python <path>, bun <path>, etc. A logic demo is a single HTML file the user double-clicks. Either way, no thinking required to start it.
  3. No persistence by default. State lives in memory. Persistence is the thing the prototype is checking, not something it should depend on. If the question explicitly involves a database, hit a scratch DB or a local file with a clear "PROTOTYPE — wipe me" name.
  4. Skip the polish. No tests, no error handling beyond what makes the prototype runnable, no abstractions. The point is to learn something fast.
  5. Surface the state. After every action (logic) or on every variant switch (UI), print or render the full relevant state so the user can see what changed.
  6. Capture it when done. Fold any validated decision into the real code, then capture the prototype itself as a primary source: commit it to a throwaway branch, out of main, and leave a context pointer to that branch on the implementation issue. Capture the answer too — the verdict and the question it settled — in the issue or a commit. The main branch keeps only the validated decision.

Read the full file on GitHub · 27 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. today First seen · 27 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 2579ecf89a7f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prototype is a skill published in the GitHub repository JimmyPaolini/codebase (0 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 641 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to prototype, differing in 14 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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