prompt-lab

prompt-lab is a skill for Claude Code from Mathews-Tom/armory. It costs 74 tokens per session (1,785 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A prompt-engineering workbench for improving instructions given to language models. It analyses a prompt, creates alternative versions, identifies failure cases, designs a scoring rubric, and builds test cases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or improve prompts, compare direct and example-based instructions, design evaluations, and test accuracy, completeness, or format compliance.
Why use it?
It replaces repeated trial and error with a way to compare prompts against defined goals and common failure modes. It can also help control whether the model follows a required output format.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the armory plugin — 85 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to create or improve prompts, compare direct and example-based instructions, design evaluations, and test accuracy, completeness, or format compliance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mathews-tom/armory/prompt-lab
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 Mathews-Tom/armory --skill prompt-lab
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Mathews-Tom/armory

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install armory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 85 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 prompt-lab

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mathews-tom/armory/prompt-lab.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mathews-tom/armory/prompt-lab)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mathews-tom/armory/prompt-lab"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mathews-tom/armory/prompt-lab.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,785 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Prompt Injection · line 185
    Large whitespace padding was detected (a block of blank lines or a long run of spaces). This can push injected instructions below or to the right of the visible area so a human reviewer never sees them while the agent still reads them. Manual review of the hidden content is recommended.
    Fix: Remove the large whitespace padding (blank-line blocks or long space runs) and review any content hidden below or to the right of it. Keep skill files compact and reviewable so no instructions can be
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 $0.00074 $0.01785
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00892
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00357
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00178

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9b65de51aa20, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prompt-lab 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 2d 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/prompt-lab/SKILL.md · 200 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prompt Lab

Replaces trial-and-error prompt engineering with structured methodology: objective definition, current prompt analysis, variant generation (instruction clarity, example strategies, output format specification), evaluation rubric design, test case creation, and failure mode identification.

Reference Files

File Contents Load When
references/prompt-patterns.md Prompt structure catalog: zero-shot, few-shot, CoT, persona, structured output Always
references/evaluation-metrics.md Quality metrics (accuracy, format compliance, completeness), rubric design Evaluation needed
references/failure-modes.md Common prompt failure taxonomy, detection strategies, mitigations Failure analysis requested
references/output-constraints.md Techniques for constraining LLM output format, JSON mode, schema enforcement Format control needed

Prerequisites

  • Clear objective: what should the prompt accomplish?
  • Target model (GPT-4, Claude, open-source) — prompting techniques vary by model
  • Current prompt (if improving) or task description (if creating)

Workflow

Phase 1: Define Objective

  1. Task specification — What should the LLM produce? Be specific: "Classify customer support tickets into 5 categories" not "Handle support tickets."
  2. Success criteria — How do you know the output is correct? Define measurable criteria before writing any prompt.
  3. Failure modes — What does a bad output look like? Missing information? Wrong format? Hallucinated content? Refusal to answer?

Phase 2: Analyze Current Prompt

If an existing prompt is provided:

  1. Structure assessment — Is the instruction clear? Are examples provided? Is the output format specified?
  2. Ambiguity detection — Where could the model misinterpret the instruction?
  3. Missing components — What's not specified that should be? (output format, tone, length constraints, edge case handling)
  4. Failure mode mapping — Which known failure patterns (see references/failure-modes.md) apply to this prompt?

Read the full file on GitHub · 200 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 2d ago First seen · 200 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 9b65de51aa20

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prompt-lab is a skill published in the GitHub repository Mathews-Tom/armory (316 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 1,785 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-05.

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