Guidance for judging whether software tests give useful protection for their cost. It covers slow, flaky, duplicated, brittle, failing, and newly changed tests.

Use it when auditing tests, choosing tests for an implementation, reviewing test changes before a commit or pull request, or diagnosing a failure.

It helps distinguish a real product regression from a bad test or environment problem, while avoiding unnecessary repository-wide test work.

How openpi-dev/openpi configures Claude Code and Codex

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to openpi-dev/openpi. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openpi-dev/openpi/main/.agents/skills/test-value/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/openpi-dev/openpi

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/openpi-dev/openpi/test-value.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,754 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 95% copy Near-identical to another mod 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00055	$0.01754
Opus 5.5	$0.00022	$0.00702
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00011	$0.00351
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00175

Measured 11d ago against content hash db4402e18f1c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

test-value 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.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to test-value — 8 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/test-value/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Test Value

Protect outcomes worth preserving at a cost proportionate to their risk. Test counts, coverage percentages and green runs are evidence, not substitutes for product judgment. When an AI writes both implementation and tests, check whether they share the same mistaken assumption.

Choose the scope

Preserve the user's existing authorization and operational boundaries.

Audit existing tests: investigate cost, false alarms and protection within the requested scope. An audit request is read-only; an optimization request permits scoped changes. Read audit.md.
Implementation or pre-commit review: examine the behavior being changed and its affected tests. Decide whether to add, adapt, reuse or remove tests. Reviewing before a commit does not itself authorize committing or pushing.
Diagnose a failure: identify the outcome the failing check protects, then distinguish a product regression, obsolete assertion, environment failure or unstable test. Keep a narrowly requested fix narrow.

Read decision-examples.md when dealing with automatic-layout snapshots, shared matrices, source assertions, semantic identity, asynchronous waits, test doubles, benchmarks or coverage gaps.

Establish an independent basis for correctness

Explain what must remain true using user requirements, public contracts, compatibility commitments or a real failure. The current implementation and its own generated output cannot, by themselves, establish the correct expectation.

For tests being added or changed, answer three questions in the reasoning or a short change explanation:

Which concrete mistake would fail this test, and what loss would it cause a user or maintainer?
Would an equivalent refactor or a better valid result also fail? Which restrictions are actually contractual?
Which existing test, type check or other check already catches this mistake? Does the additional protection justify its execution and maintenance cost?

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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.

11d ago First seen · 91 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A db4402e18f1c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

test-value is a skill published in the GitHub repository openpi-dev/openpi (196 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,754 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to test-value, differing in 8 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Testing

research-engineer

An uncompromising Academic Research Engineer. Operates with absolute scientific rigor, objective criticism, and zero flair. Focuses on theoretical correctness, formal verification, and optimal implementation across any required technology.

davila7/claude-code-templates · 43 tokens

tika-eval-compare

Compare extracts from two Tika builds over a corpus to detect regressions in content, encoding, exceptions, and embedded-document handling. Use for "compare before/after extracts", "eval this change against the corpus".

apache/tika · 50 tokens

cua-driver

Use Cua Driver for desktop or browser tasks that are awkward or unavailable through Bash/APIs, or when the user explicitly wants GUI interaction: app testing, visual bug reproduction, form filling, calendar entry, screenshots, and demo recording. Also covers Cua setup; not OpenAI Codex Computer Use or web research.

davidondrej/skills · 68 tokens

openpi: Skill for Claude Code