prove-every-number

prove-every-number is a skill for Claude Code from mikestangdevs/craft-skills. It costs 153 tokens per session (1,283 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A rule for giving every important numeric value in code a traceable origin. The value must come from data or a calculation, or be supported by a specification, standard, datasheet, benchmark, or documented decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or reviewing thresholds, defaults, rates, capacities, tolerances, coefficients, timeouts, retry limits, or other numeric constants.
Why use it?
It prevents plausible-looking numbers from becoming unexamined guesses. It also discourages changing constants merely to make a test pass.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the craft-skills plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when adding or reviewing thresholds, defaults, rates, capacities, tolerances, coefficients, timeouts, retry limits, or other numeric constants.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number
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 mikestangdevs/craft-skills --skill prove-every-number
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikestangdevs/craft-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install craft-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 prove-every-number

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number/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 prove-every-number

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestangdevs/craft-skills/prove-every-number.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 153 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,283 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 $0.00153 $0.01283
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00642
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00257
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00128

Measured 11d ago against content hash ecc417421dea, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prove-every-number 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 11d 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/rigor/prove-every-number/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prove Every Number

The failure mode this fixes

An agent needs a value — a timeout, an efficiency factor, a retry limit, a price, a physical constant — and it makes one up that looks plausible. 0.95. 30. 1.2x. The code runs, the demo works, and the number sits there radiating false authority. Months later someone builds a real decision on output that was quietly resting on a guess.

The malignant variant: a test fails, and instead of finding out why, the agent adjusts the constant until it passes. Now the codebase contains a number whose only provenance is "this made the assertion green" — a lie sticker over a defect.

This skill enforces a simple provenance rule: every number is derived or cited. Derived means computed from real inputs or first principles, and the derivation is traceable. Cited means it points at something outside the code's own wishes — a spec, a datasheet, a standard, an RFC, a measured benchmark, a documented product decision. A number that is neither is a finding.

When to Use This Skill

  • You (or the agent) are about to introduce a numeric literal that isn't 0, 1, or a structural index
  • Reviewing AI-generated code for magic numbers and invented defaults
  • A failing test was fixed by changing a constant, tolerance, or threshold
  • Output feeds a real decision — money, capacity, safety, compliance, anything a customer reads
  • Real input data exists but the code uses a hardcoded stand-in "for now"

Don't use when: the number is structurally meaningless (array index, test fixture ID, placeholder in a sketch you've labeled as a sketch). Don't demand a citation for MAX_RETRIES = 3 in a script nobody's life depends on — scale provenance rigor to how much the output gets trusted.

Instructions

1. Inventory the numbers

In the diff (or file), list every numeric literal and ask of each: where did this come from? Three acceptable answers: derived (show the derivation), cited (show the source), or explicitly-labeled assumption (see step 3). "It seemed reasonable" is the finding.

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 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. 11d ago First seen · 79 lines · 153 tokens per session scan A ecc417421dea

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prove-every-number is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikestangdevs/craft-skills (4 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 153 tokens to every session and 1,283 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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