cut

A planning check that looks for assumptions a proposed direction depends on and tests whether they might be wrong. It ranks the risks and suggests cheap tests to disprove the most important ones.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before committing significant effort to a technical plan. It is useful for selecting quick checks that could show the plan should be abandoned or changed.
Why use it?
It helps avoid spending days on a plan built on a false belief, such as trusting an API response, file, user need, or test suite without checking it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/megaprompting/torque-loop/cut
Any agent
npx skills add Megaprompting/torque-loop --skill cut
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Megaprompting/torque-loop

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 537 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00062 $0.00537
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00269
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00107
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00054

Measured 2d ago against content hash 110bbd117eae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cut 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/cut/SKILL.md · 62 lines

What it actually says

/ratchet:cut — the anti-delusion pass

Every plan rests on assumptions. Most are fine. A few are load-bearing and wrong, and those are the ones that waste days. This command finds them and hands you the cheapest test to kill each before it costs you.

Step 0 — Load state

ratchet status

Procedure

  1. Surface the assumptions the current objective and chosen bottleneck depend on. Include the silent ones — "the API returns what the docs say", "the user actually wants this", "this file is the source of truth", "the test suite covers this path".

  2. For each assumption, specify:

    • Breakage mode — what specifically goes wrong if it is false.
    • Detection signal — the observable that would reveal the break.
    • Falsification test — the cheapest action that would prove it false. Prefer a five-minute check over a five-hour build.
  3. Rank by damage × likelihood. An assumption that is cheap to test and catastrophic if wrong goes first.

  4. Pick the top three kill-tests — the ones worth running before any further build. A kill-test is a test designed to end the plan cheaply, not to confirm it.

Output contract

ASSUMPTIONS (ranked by damage × likelihood):
- <assumption> | breaks: <mode> | signal: <detection> | test: <cheapest falsification>
- ...

TOP 3 KILL-TESTS (run before building):
1. <test> — kills the plan if: <result>
2. ...
3. ...

Serialize

Record the riskiest untested assumptions so the loop can't forget them:

ratchet state append assumptions '{"text":"...","killTest":"...","status":"untested"}'
ratchet state set phase cut

Untested assumptions drain confidence (ratchet score confidence). Run the kill-tests, then mark survivors: append with "status":"tested" or "status":"killed".

Next: if the plan survives, /ratchet:build. If a kill-test lands, /ratchet:lock again.

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 · 62 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 110bbd117eae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cut is a skill published in the GitHub repository Megaprompting/torque-loop (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 537 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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