triaging-mutants

triaging-mutants is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mattwynne/yaks. It costs 34 tokens per session (2,895 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for investigating survived mutants in mutation testing, a method that changes code slightly to check whether tests detect the change. It separates missing tests from design weaknesses and equivalent changes that need no action.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps decide whether to add a test, improve the code model, or accept a mutation after a cargo-mutants run.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from adding shallow tests when the real issue is weak design or when the mutation has no meaningful effect.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps decide whether to add a test, improve the code model, or accept a mutation after a cargo-mutants run.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants
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 mattwynne/yaks --skill triaging-mutants
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattwynne/yaks

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 triaging-mutants

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants/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 triaging-mutants

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mattwynne/yaks/triaging-mutants.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,895 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: 3 findings, up to high

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 →

  • high Rogue Agent · line 289
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • high Rogue Agent · line 289
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 328
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00034 $0.02895
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01448
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00579
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00290

Measured 10d ago against content hash da458ac9dbba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

triaging-mutants 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 10d 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/triaging-mutants/SKILL.md · 331 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 331 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Triaging Mutants

Overview

A survived mutant is a question, not just a gap in test coverage. When cargo mutants reports a miss, the obvious response is to write a test that kills it. But that's often the shallow fix. The deeper question is: why did this mutation produce code that still works?

Three possibilities:

  1. Missing test — the behaviour is real and untested. Write a test.
  2. Design weakness — the code tolerates the mutation because the design is too permissive, has redundant paths, or uses a representation that doesn't constrain values tightly enough. Improve the design so the mutation becomes impossible or obviously wrong.
  3. Equivalent mutant — the mutation produces logically identical behaviour. No action needed; mark it accepted.

Option 2 is the most valuable and most commonly overlooked. Changing the modelling often obviates entire classes of mutants — making the code both more correct and simpler to test.

When to Use

  • After a mutation test run produces missed mutants
  • When working on a "fix missed mutants" sub-yak
  • When reviewing mutation results before deciding what to do
  • Periodically, to reassess previously-accepted mutants

Don't use when:

  • No mutation results exist yet (run dev mutate first)
  • The mutant is in generated or trivial code (skip it)

Pacing

Don't ask which mutant to triage next — just pick one and go. After presenting a verdict and acting on it, immediately move to the next untriaged mutant. Keep momentum. The user will interrupt if they want to change direction.

Prefer domain-layer mutants over adapter-layer, and single-mutant files over multi-mutant files (quick wins build momentum).

Inputs

The skill expects one of:

  • A specific mutant yak (e.g. yx show "adapters-event_store-mod mutants")
  • A file path with mutants from mutants.out/missed.txt
  • The full mutants.out/missed.txt for a triage session

Phase 1: Gather Context

For each mutant (or group of mutants in the same file):

Read the full file on GitHub · 331 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. 10d ago First seen · 331 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A da458ac9dbba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

triaging-mutants is a skill published in the GitHub repository mattwynne/yaks (58 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 2,895 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.