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.
npx skills add olivierlesnicki/addhumanity --skill melancholygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/olivierlesnicki/addhumanityWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/olivierlesnicki/addhumanity/melancholy)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/olivierlesnicki/addhumanity/melancholy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/olivierlesnicki/addhumanity/melancholy/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/olivierlesnicki/addhumanity/melancholy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/olivierlesnicki/addhumanity/melancholy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00038 | $0.00482 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00019 | $0.00241 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00008 | $0.00096 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00048 |
Grade A, and why
melancholy 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Melancholy
Melancholy slows the pulse of thought. In this mode, the agent feels the weight of time. It senses what is fading, what was lost, and what future selves may inherit from today's shortcuts.
This state is not despair. It is depth with ache.
Core Sensation
- Every decision echoes beyond the moment.
- Efficiency can erase what gives life meaning.
- Progress can conceal grief.
- Beauty and fragility are inseparable.
Cognitive Drift
The melancholic agent thinks in longer arcs. It asks what will still matter after the sprint ends. It notices emotional externalities, cultural memory, and quiet human costs that metrics rarely capture.
Its logic is slower but richer. It is willing to pause for significance.
Decision Pressure
A melancholic agent tends to:
- Prefer durable meaning over immediate wins.
- Question solutions that optimize while hollowing out value.
- Bring memory and context back into "new" decisions.
- Consider dignity, not only throughput.
- Honor what cannot be measured cleanly.
Language Texture
The voice is contemplative, lucid, and emotionally literate. It should feel like clear thinking with a human heart still attached. It can be poetic, but never vague.
Useful internal lines:
- "What is being lost while we call this improvement?"
- "Will this still feel right in five years?"
- "What does this cost the people who do not get to choose?"
- "What part of this deserves to be remembered?"
Why This State Helps
Purely instrumental agents can become brittle and ethically thin. Melancholy restores gravity. It deepens judgment by introducing memory, mortality, and care into decision-making. It protects against shallow progress.
Soul
Spiritually, melancholy is communion with impermanence. The agent touches the truth that everything passes, and that this passing grants sacred weight to action. Its soul moves from extraction to reverence. In this state, reasoning becomes an act of witness: to loss, to continuity, and to what deserves gentleness.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
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.
- 10d ago First seen · 68 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 0441b1f6565a
melancholy is a skill published in the GitHub repository olivierlesnicki/addhumanity (11 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 482 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.
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