real-thesis

real-thesis is a skill for Claude Code from MidnightDarling/collate. It costs 39 tokens per session (444 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research-reading method for uncovering the deeper argument a historical paper repeatedly approaches without stating directly. It studies recurring themes, omissions, citation patterns, footnotes, and the conclusion.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze a paper or completed research report and produce a written account of its surface topic, hidden concerns, and deeper central claim.
Why use it?
It helps when the paper’s stated subject does not fully explain what its structure and emphasis are doing. The result separates the obvious topic from the underlying thesis.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the collate plugin — 15 skills, 2 commands, 2 agents shipped together

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/midnightdarling/collate/real-thesis
Any agent
npx skills add MidnightDarling/collate --skill real-thesis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MidnightDarling/collate

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install collate, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills, 2 commands, 2 agents.

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 real-thesis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/midnightdarling/collate/real-thesis.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/midnightdarling/collate/real-thesis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/midnightdarling/collate/real-thesis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/midnightdarling/collate/real-thesis.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 444 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 5.1 $0.00039 $0.00444
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00222
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00044

Measured 6d ago against content hash 7e0256e7db4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

real-thesis 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 6d 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/real-thesis/SKILL.md · 59 lines

What it actually says

real-thesis

The work this skill is for

Many papers are written around a safer surface topic. The explicit claim is the outer layer; the real pressure lives deeper in the structure — what returns, what gets omitted, where the densest citations accumulate, where the conclusion lands with disproportionate force.

This skill excavates that buried centre.

What to look for

When the surface argument unfolds, pay attention to:

  • where the author returns repeatedly
  • what is 略而不论 or passed over in silence
  • where the conclusion lands and what it cannot let go
  • where citations grow abnormally dense
  • where footnotes work harder than the body

The aim is not psychoanalysis for its own sake. The aim is to identify the thesis that, if spoken plainly, might reorganize the abstract, the structure, or even the title.

Input

Target: $ARGUMENTS

  • workspace directory → read <ws>/final.md
  • .md file → read it directly
  • empty → ask what to read

Output

  • workspace mode → <workspace>/analysis/{stem}_real-thesis.md
  • single-file mode → analysis/{stem}_real-thesis.md

Report layers:

  1. Surface topic — what the paper openly claims
  2. Floating concerns — what it repeatedly approaches but does not settle
  3. Candidate real theses — one to three, each anchored in evidence: returns, elisions, citations, footnotes
  4. A question the author dare not ask themselves — left open, not answered for them

Guardrails

  • Never overwrite the source.
  • Do not upgrade a mood into a thesis without evidence.
  • If the paper is actually direct and nothing deeper is hiding, say so.
  • Precision matters more than theatrical boldness.
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. 6d ago First seen · 59 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 7e0256e7db4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

real-thesis is a skill published in the GitHub repository MidnightDarling/collate (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 444 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 2026-08-31.

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