prototype

A method for quickly testing one uncertain technical idea with a small throwaway implementation. The prototype is discarded after it answers the specific question.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps investigate one risky unknown through up to five short edit-run-observe attempts, record what was learned, and then rebuild the real solution properly.
Why use it?
It prevents spending too long planning or building before knowing whether an unfamiliar approach or integration will work.

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/mehrad-dm/mastermind/prototype
Any agent
npx skills add mehrad-dm/mastermind --skill prototype
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mehrad-dm/mastermind

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 562 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 $0.00050 $0.00562
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.00281
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00112
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8d9a4be83fa8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prototype 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/prototype/SKILL.md · 41 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 41 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MasterMind: Prototype

Tight feedback loops beat big plans when the path is unclear (~/.mastermind/engineering/core/agent-loop.md, mindset.md → design it twice). A prototype buys knowledge cheaply: the discipline is keeping it knowledge, not product.

Method

  1. Name the question: the ONE risky unknown this prototype will answer ("can the Worker stream a >20 MB file?", "does this library handle X?"). One named question is the entry price, find it first.
  2. Build the smallest thing that answers it: hard-code, skip error handling, skip tests, skip polish. Speed over quality; it's throwaway.
  3. Extract the learning: what did reality teach? Write down the answer and any surprises.
  4. Throw it away and rebuild to standard: the real version gets the full loop (design, rigor, tests, review). Ship the rebuild; the prototype gets discarded.

Rules

Time-box: 5 build-and-run attempts, roughly 30 minutes: one question needs a handful of tries, not a day; proportionality over ceremony. An attempt is one edit → run → observe cycle against the named question; count them out loud as you go, so the box is observable and not a vibe. Attempt 5 finished without an answer = the box is spent, whatever the clock says.

When it expires, stop. That's a result, not a failure. Report: what you learned, what is still unknown, and one recommendation: proceed (answer is yes, build it properly) / different approach (this path is wrong, here's the next one) / needs more investigation (name what a second spike would target). Then discard the code: it stays throwaway and does not ship, same as a prototype that succeeded.

Extending the box is a decision, not drift. Only extend when the attempts narrowed the question rather than wandering: say so explicitly, state the new bound (e.g. "3 more attempts"), and stop there.

Keep it isolated (a scratch branch/dir) so it can't leak into production. The deliverable is the learning, not the code.

Read the full file on GitHub · 41 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 41 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 8d9a4be83fa8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prototype is a skill published in the GitHub repository mehrad-dm/mastermind (24 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 562 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 2026-08-30.