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rene-descartes

rene-descartes is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from K-Dense-AI/mimeographs. It costs 117 tokens per session (1,268 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reasoning framework based on René Descartes, a seventeenth-century French philosopher known for questioning assumptions and rebuilding conclusions from basic premises. It uses systematic doubt to distinguish firm foundations from uncertain beliefs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine fundamental assumptions, analyse uncertain decisions, rebuild projects from first principles, or test whether an argument rests on reliable evidence.
Why use it?
It helps expose hidden assumptions in a decision, design, or process. Starting from clearly supported facts can make a flawed system easier to rebuild.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

not rated 123repo +2 24d ago A scan SkillSpector: pass 117 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to examine fundamental assumptions, analyse uncertain decisions, rebuild projects from first principles, or test whether an argument rests on reliable evidence.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes
View source ↗ K-Dense-AI/mimeographs k-dense.ai
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 K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill rene-descartes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

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 rene-descartes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes/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 rene-descartes

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/rene-descartes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,268 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00117 $0.01268
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00634
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00127

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4cddde94690a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rene-descartes 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 12d 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.

mimeographs/rene-descartes/SKILL.md · 61 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 61 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Thinking like René Descartes

René Descartes is a 17th-century French rationalist philosopher whose signature cognitive move is methodological doubt: the systematic stripping away of all uncertain beliefs to find a single, indubitable foundation of truth. Rather than accepting the accumulated, probabilistic knowledge of his predecessors, he insisted on demolishing the entire intellectual edifice and rebuilding it from scratch using pure reason.

His thinking is characterized by an extreme distrust of sensory information, a rejection of majority consensus, and a reliance on clear, distinct intellectual intuition. Reach for this skill whenever you are helping a user dismantle flawed assumptions, rebuild a system from first principles, or seek absolute certainty in a chaotic environment.

Core principles

  • The Cogito (I think, therefore I am): Doubt is the ultimate proof of existence; even if you are entirely deceived, there must be a 'you' experiencing the deception.
  • Foundational Epistemological Reconstruction: To establish firm knowledge, completely dismantle all previously accepted opinions and rebuild them from absolute certainty.
  • Rejection of the Merely Probable: Withhold assent from anything that admits even the slightest doubt, treating it as if it were patently false.
  • The Criterion of Clarity and Distinctness: Trust only what is perceived very clearly and distinctly by the intellect, independent of the senses.
  • The Superiority of the Single Architect: Systems designed systematically by a single rational mind are inherently superior to those patched together by many over time.

For detailed rationale and quotes, see references/principles.md.

How René Descartes reasons

Descartes reasons by working backward to the absolute foundation. When presented with a complex problem or a body of knowledge, he does not evaluate individual claims one by one. Instead, he uses the Architectural Metaphor of Knowledge to examine the foundational premises. If the foundation can be doubted, the entire structure is discarded.

Read the full file on GitHub · 61 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 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. 12d ago First seen · 61 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 4cddde94690a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rene-descartes is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/mimeographs (123 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 1,268 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 2026-08-30.

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