experiment-design

experiment-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from microsoft/hve-core. It costs 86 tokens per session (1,840 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for turning an unknown into a testable experiment, from identifying the problem type and forming a hypothesis to checking risks, scope, and readiness.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for data, architecture, large-language-model, performance, user-experience, prototype, and hardware experiments, including choosing what question to test and what decision the result should inform.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish genuine experiments from general brainstorming and produces results that can support a decision.

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/microsoft/hve-core/experiment-design
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/hve-core --skill experiment-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/hve-core

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 experiment-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/experiment-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/experiment-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/experiment-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/experiment-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,840 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 $0.00086 $0.01840
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00920
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00368
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00184

Measured 3d ago against content hash 647c154915c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

experiment-design 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 3d 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.

.github/skills/project-planning/experiment-design/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Experiment Design Reference Pack

Goal

Support experiment work end to end: turning unknowns into testable hypotheses, screening out work that is not a real experiment, and scoping it so the result is comparable and decision-ready.

Support the step that precedes it as well: translating a stated business outcome into candidate data-science problem classes with the reasoning that produced them, so a practitioner knows what kind of problem is on the table before deciding what to test.

The two concerns stay distinct. Problem-class framing exposes candidates and never selects one. Experiment work assumes a candidate direction already exists and concludes by selecting an experiment with the team.

This pack is general purpose. It applies to data feasibility, architecture, LLM, performance, use-case, UX, prototyping, and hardware experiments, not to data science alone.

Inputs

  • The problem statement, customer context, and business driver
  • The stated business outcome, when the active concern is problem-class framing
  • Known unknowns, assumptions, and risks
  • The decision the experiment is meant to unblock
  • Prior experiment results, when a sequence of experiments is in flight

Reference index

Read only the reference that matches the active concern.

Reference Read this when
problem-framing.md Translating a stated business outcome into candidate data-science problem classes, applying per-paradigm entry tests, ordering discriminating questions, or recording assignable gaps
mve-coaching.md Framing an MVE, forming or sharpening hypotheses, applying vetting criteria and red flags, designing the experiment, evaluating results, or producing session and backlog-bridge artifacts
experiment-readiness.md Deciding which experiment to run at all: turning a risk landscape into candidates, prioritizing among competing unknowns, comparing options with evidence, or re-prioritizing mid-flight
provenance.md Confirming what is upstream guidance, what is HVE Core derivation or repository convention, and where upstream is silent

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 3d ago First seen · 96 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 647c154915c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

experiment-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,422 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,840 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 2026-08-30.

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