socratic-code-theory-recovery

socratic-code-theory-recovery is a skill for Claude Code from LLM-Coding/Semantic-Anchors. It costs 115 tokens per session (2,598 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A method for reconstructing the missing theory of an existing codebase through a sequence of refined questions. It separates facts that the code can prove from decisions that the team must explain.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it on an existing project when you need evidence-based documentation for a specific bounded context, a defined business or technical area of the codebase.
Why use it?
It prevents documentation from presenting guesses as facts when a project has little or no reliable specification.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the semantic-anchors plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it on an existing project when you need evidence-based documentation for a specific bounded context, a defined business or technical area of the codebase.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/llm-coding/semantic-anchors/socratic-code-theory-recovery
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 LLM-Coding/Semantic-Anchors --skill socratic-code-theory-recovery
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LLM-Coding/Semantic-Anchors

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install semantic-anchors, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

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 socratic-code-theory-recovery

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/llm-coding/semantic-anchors/socratic-code-theory-recovery.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/llm-coding/semantic-anchors/socratic-code-theory-recovery)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/llm-coding/semantic-anchors/socratic-code-theory-recovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/llm-coding/semantic-anchors/socratic-code-theory-recovery.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,598 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 $0.00115 $0.02598
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01299
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00520
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00260

Measured 9d ago against content hash 049ed1bedd29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

socratic-code-theory-recovery 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 9d 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.

plugins/semantic-anchors/skills/socratic-code-theory-recovery/SKILL.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Socratic Code-Theory Recovery

Reverse-engineer a bounded context into documentation without hallucinating the parts the code cannot tell you.

On invocation

When this skill is invoked:

  1. Check whether the user named a bounded context. Look at the same message that invoked the skill and at the immediately preceding messages. A valid bounded-context pointer is a path (relative or absolute) to a directory, plus a short human-readable name for what the context is (e.g. src/auth, "Authentication"). If both are present, proceed to Phase 1.

  2. If no bounded context is named, ask for it before doing anything else. Do not start Phase 1 against the current working directory by default — Phase 1 produces files (QUESTION_TREE-<context-name>.adoc, OPEN_QUESTIONS-<context-name>.adoc) and running it on the wrong directory wastes work. Ask exactly:

    Which bounded context should I apply Socratic Code-Theory Recovery to? Give me a directory path (the bounded context's code root) and a short human-readable name. If you want the whole current repo treated as one bounded context, say so explicitly.

  3. Once you have the pointer, run Phase 1. Use prompts/phase-1-question-tree.md — substitute [bounded context path] with the user's path and [context-name] with the kebab-cased human-readable name. Do not change the leaf classification, Q-ID scheme, or the output-file naming scheme.

  4. Stop after Phase 1. Tell the user that Phase 1 is complete, where the two output files are, and that the next step is routing OPEN_QUESTIONS-<context-name>.adoc to the team. Phase 2 is gated on the file, not on being asked: before starting Phase 2 — even when the user explicitly requests it — check that every [OPEN] leaf in OPEN_QUESTIONS-<context-name>.adoc has either a team answer or an explicit (deferred) marker. If any leaf has neither, do not run Phase 2; list the unanswered leaves instead.

When to use this skill

Use this skill on a brownfield codebase when:

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 9d ago First seen · 134 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A 049ed1bedd29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

socratic-code-theory-recovery is a skill published in the GitHub repository LLM-Coding/Semantic-Anchors (467 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 115 tokens to every session and 2,598 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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