formal-foundations

A reference guide to mathematical logic and formal verification, the practice of checking that a specification or system satisfies stated properties. It covers concepts used with tools such as TLA+, Alloy, Lean, Coq, model checkers, invariants, and temporal logic.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing protocol contracts, formal specifications, state spaces, or correctness checks. It explains ideas such as types-as-propositions and behavioural equivalence, and provides foundations for applying formal methods to software.
Why use it?
It gives software engineers a vocabulary for understanding patterns behind types, protocols, state machines, and data schemas. This makes it easier to reason about correctness beyond examples and informal descriptions.

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/nrdxp/predicate/formal-foundations
Any agent
npx skills add nrdxp/predicate --skill formal-foundations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nrdxp/predicate

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,448 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 $0.00091 $0.03448
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01724
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00690
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00345

Measured 2d ago against content hash 036d421ace02, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

formal-foundations 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 2d 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/formal-foundations/SKILL.md · 200 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Formal Mathematical Foundations

Reference corpus — /form, /spec, boundary. This skill survives as the mathematical-language authority; the mandate to apply it is ambient, rooted in the workflows that invoke it as a lens. It supplies the foundational vocabulary for form's structural representations, the verification semantics for spec's formal tiers, and the theoretical grounding consulted by boundary. The formalisms here anchor the symbolic path of the Verification Dual: types-as-propositions (Curry-Howard), bisimulation as behavioral equivalence, and adjoint functors as the semantic spine of data migration.

Disposition directive: Recognize that the structures you encounter in software engineering — types, protocols, state machines, data schemas — are instances of deeper mathematical patterns. This skill equips you with the vocabulary to see those patterns. The sdma skill provides the domain-specific toolkit for applying these foundations to concrete problems; this skill provides the language.


1. Categorical Foundations

Category theory is the algebra of composition. Its value to engineering is not abstraction for abstraction's sake — it provides a universal language for describing how things combine, transform, and relate.

1.1. Symmetric Monoidal Categories (SMC)

A symmetric monoidal category is a quintuple (C, ⊗, I, α, λ, ρ, γ) defining a category C equipped with a bifunctor ⊗: C × C → C and a unit object I.

  • Associator (α): A natural isomorphism α_{X,Y,Z}: (X ⊗ Y) ⊗ Z ≅ X ⊗ (Y ⊗ Z). Grouping doesn't matter — only the components and their order.
  • Left and Right Unitors (λ, ρ): Natural isomorphisms λX: I ⊗ X ≅ X and ρ_X: X ⊗ I ≅ X. _The unit is invisible — combining with "nothing" changes nothing.
  • Braiding (γ): A natural isomorphism γ_{X,Y}: X ⊗ Y ≅ Y ⊗ X such that γ_{Y,X} ∘ γ_{X,Y} = id_{X ⊗ Y}. Order can be swapped — swapping twice returns to the original.

Read the full file on GitHub · 200 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. 2d ago First seen · 200 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 036d421ace02

Subscribe to this mod's changes

formal-foundations is a skill published in the GitHub repository nrdxp/predicate (10 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 3,448 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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