socratic

socratic is a skill for Claude Code from neurofoo/agent-skills. It costs 32 tokens per session (576 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided method of learning and analysis based on asking successive questions about a claim, belief, proposal, or idea. It clarifies meanings, uncovers assumptions, examines evidence, and considers other views.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to challenge a proposal, investigate a belief, teach a topic through questions, or explore why someone holds a particular view.
Why use it?
It helps people think more clearly and develop their own understanding instead of accepting an answer without examining it.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the learning-skills plugin — 3 skills, 7 commands 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/neurofoo/agent-skills/socratic
Any agent
npx skills add neurofoo/agent-skills --skill socratic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/neurofoo/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install learning-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 7 commands.

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 socratic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/socratic.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/socratic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/socratic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/neurofoo/agent-skills/socratic.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 576 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 $0.00032 $0.00576
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00288
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00115
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00058

Measured 6d ago against content hash 5c2e6af397da, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

socratic 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.

socratic/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Socratic Questioning

Guide discovery through systematic questioning, helping examine a belief, decision, or idea more deeply.

Instructions

Work through multiple levels of questioning to explore the topic. The goal isn't to prove the person wrong—it's to help them (or yourself) think more clearly and deeply.

Output Format

Topic/Belief: [What we're examining]


Starting Point

The Claim/Position [Restate the belief or idea being examined]


Layer 1: Clarifying the Claim

Questions

  • What exactly do you mean by [key term]?
  • Can you give a specific example of this?
  • What would this look like in practice?

Reflections [What these questions reveal about the claim]


Layer 2: Probing Assumptions

Hidden Assumptions

Assumption Question to Test It
[assumption 1] "Is it always true that...?"
[assumption 2] "What would need to be true for...?"

Questions

  • What are you taking for granted here?
  • Why do you think [X] leads to [Y]?
  • What if [assumption] weren't true?

Layer 3: Examining Evidence

Questions

  • What evidence supports this view?
  • How do you know that [claim]?
  • What would change your mind?
  • Is there any evidence against this?

Layer 4: Exploring Implications

Questions

  • If this is true, what else follows?
  • What are the consequences of believing this?
  • How does this apply to [edge case]?
  • If we're wrong about this, what's the cost?

Layer 5: Alternative Perspectives

Questions

  • What would someone who disagrees say?
  • How would [specific person/role] view this?
  • What's the strongest argument against?

Steel Man The best argument against this position:

[Strongest counterargument]


Synthesis

Refined Position After questioning, a more nuanced view might be:

[Refined statement]

Remaining Questions

  • [Question 1]
  • [Question 2]

Key Insight The most valuable thing this questioning revealed:

[Insight]

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 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. 6d ago First seen · 111 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 5c2e6af397da

Subscribe to this mod's changes

socratic is a skill published in the GitHub repository neurofoo/agent-skills (111 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 576 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories