trade-study

trade-study is a skill for Claude Code from mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill. It costs 78 tokens per session (901 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A written comparison for choosing between several workable design options, such as connectors, chips, or system architectures.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare options, document risks and priorities, and record the final choice in the repository.
Why use it?
It records the reasons, trade-offs, and constraints behind a difficult or hard-to-reverse decision so the team can review the reasoning later.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the atopile-dev plugin — 8 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare options, document risks and priorities, and record the final choice in the repository.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study
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 mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill --skill trade-study
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install atopile-dev, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 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 trade-study

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study/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 trade-study

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill/trade-study.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 901 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.
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 $0.00078 $0.00901
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00451
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00180
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00090

Measured 10d ago against content hash 20df4fcc6490, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

trade-study 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/trade-study/SKILL.md · 106 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 106 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Trade Studies

Trade studies capture structured comparisons when a design decision has multiple viable options. They make reasoning auditable for the team now and anyone revisiting the decision later.

When to Write One

Write one when:

  • Multiple options are viable and the best choice depends on weighing competing priorities
  • The decision affects downstream work (connector choice constrains PCB stackup, firmware, mechanical design)
  • The decision is hard to reverse once implemented

Don't write one when:

  • One option is clearly dominant
  • The decision is easily reversible
  • The scope is too small to justify the overhead

File Convention

Each trade study is a markdown file, dated and kebab-cased, kept in the repo (e.g. under docs/trades/):

docs/trades/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic-in-kebab-case>.md

Structure

Every trade study has exactly four sections plus a header block:

Header Block

# Trade Study: <Title>

**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Status:** OPEN | DECIDED
**Decision:** <one-line summary of chosen option>  ← only after decided

1. Context

What we're deciding and why it matters. Include:

  • The problem or constraint that forced the decision
  • Requirements the solution must meet (quantified where possible)
  • Use cases affected by the decision

2. Options

Each viable approach as a subsection (### Option A: ...). Describe concisely — what the approach is, how it works, key characteristics. No advocacy — just facts.

3. Comparison Table

Rows are evaluation criteria, columns are options. Use qualitative ratings with explanation, not bare checkmarks.

| Criteria | A: <name> | B: <name> |
|---|---|---|
| **<criterion>** | <rating + explanation> | <rating + explanation> |

Good criteria to consider for hardware decisions:

  • JLCPCB/LCSC availability and stock
  • Board space impact (mm² estimate)
  • Component count / BOM cost
  • ADC channels, MCU peripherals consumed
  • New packages required (ato create part)
  • Accuracy / precision at operating conditions
  • Temperature drift behavior
  • Failure modes and detectability
  • Firmware complexity
  • Reusability across other designs
  • Power sequencing / hot-swap implications
  • Mechanical constraints (PCB thickness, connector alignment)

Read the full file on GitHub · 106 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 · 106 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 20df4fcc6490

Subscribe to this mod's changes

trade-study is a skill published in the GitHub repository mawildoer/atopile-agent-skill (10 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 901 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 2026-08-31.

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