adversarial-ux-test

adversarial-ux-test is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NousResearch/hermes-agent. It costs 21 tokens per session (2,136 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A usability test in which the tester roleplays a frustrated person who dislikes technology and tries to use the product. The findings are then sorted to separate genuine design problems from personal complaints.

In plain words
What is it for?
Find unclear wording, excessive steps, missing onboarding, accessibility problems, poor empty states, and signup or payment friction in an app or website.
Why use it?
It reveals confusion and unnecessary effort that normal technical testing may miss, even when the software works correctly. It focuses on the experience of real users rather than only on bugs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Find unclear wording, excessive steps, missing onboarding, accessibility problems, poor empty states, and signup or payment friction in an app or website.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test
About the project

Hermes Agent is an AI assistant that learns from its use by creating and improving skills, retaining knowledge, searching past conversations, and adapting to its users. It is for people who want to run an agent through a terminal or messaging platforms while connecting it to different AI models and scheduled tasks.

NousResearch/hermes-agent · 243,598 stars · on GitHub · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com

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 NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill adversarial-ux-test
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

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 adversarial-ux-test

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test/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 adversarial-ux-test

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/adversarial-ux-test.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,136 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. Third-party audits
  • Snyk warn 7 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Data Exfiltration · line 54
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00021 $0.02136
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01068
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00427
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00214

Measured 10d ago against content hash d687ee772717, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adversarial-ux-test 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 10d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

optional-skills/dogfood/adversarial-ux-test/SKILL.md · 192 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 192 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Adversarial UX Test

Roleplay the worst-case user for your product — the person who hates technology, doesn't want your software, and will find every reason to complain. Then filter their feedback through a pragmatism layer to separate real UX problems from "I hate computers" noise.

Think of it as an automated "mom test" — but angry.

Why This Works

Most QA finds bugs. This finds friction. A technically correct app can still be unusable for real humans. The adversarial persona catches:

  • Confusing terminology that makes sense to developers but not users
  • Too many steps to accomplish basic tasks
  • Missing onboarding or "aha moments"
  • Accessibility issues (font size, contrast, click targets)
  • Cold-start problems (empty states, no demo content)
  • Paywall/signup friction that kills conversion

The pragmatism filter (Phase 3) is what makes this useful instead of just entertaining. Without it, you'd add a "print this page" button to every screen because Grandpa can't figure out PDFs.

How to Use

Tell the agent:

"Run an adversarial UX test on [URL]"
"Be a grumpy [persona type] and test [app name]"
"Do an asshole user test on my staging site"

You can provide a persona or let the agent generate one based on your product's target audience.

Step 1: Define the Persona

If no persona is provided, generate one by answering:

  1. Who is the HARDEST user for this product? (age 50+, non-technical role, decades of experience doing it "the old way")
  2. What is their tech comfort level? (the lower the better — WhatsApp-only, paper notebooks, wife set up their email)
  3. What is the ONE thing they need to accomplish? (their core job, not your feature list)
  4. What would make them give up? (too many clicks, jargon, slow, confusing)
  5. How do they talk when frustrated? (blunt, sweary, dismissive, sighing)

Good Persona Example

"Big Mick" McAllister — 58-year-old S&C coach. Uses WhatsApp and that's it. His "spreadsheet" is a paper notebook. "If I can't figure it out in 10 seconds I'm going back to my notebook." Needs to log session results for 25 players. Hates small text, jargon, and passwords.

Read the full file on GitHub · 192 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. 10d ago First seen · 192 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A d687ee772717

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adversarial-ux-test is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (243,598 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 2,136 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.