instruction-phrasing-microtest

instruction-phrasing-microtest is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin. It costs 59 tokens per session (1,283 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A small test process for comparing different wordings of an instruction given to an AI agent. It scores each wording against a version with no extra guidance and manually checks the matches.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for testing rules in skills, prompt templates, and agent instructions before adopting a new phrasing.
Why use it?
It helps determine whether a wording change actually alters the agent's output instead of relying on intuition. It can also show when a proposed change does not improve the target result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the odin-agent plugin — 46 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for testing rules in skills, prompt templates, and agent instructions before adopting a new phrasing.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-phrasing-microtest
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 OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin --skill instruction-phrasing-microtest
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install odin-agent, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 46 skills.

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 instruction-phrasing-microtest

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-phrasing-microtest.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-phrasing-microtest)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-phrasing-microtest"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/instruction-phrasing-microtest.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,283 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
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00059 $0.01283
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00642
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00257
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00128

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9d2923fddb79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

instruction-phrasing-microtest 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 3d 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.

plugins/odin-agent/skills/instruction-phrasing-microtest/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Instruction phrasing microtest

Contract

Field Bound contract
Trigger About to change the wording of a rule in a skill, prompt template, or agent instruction, where the change is meant to alter what the model produces.
Authority Reversible-local: writes only a local results table file; no repository, VCS, credential, paid, published, deployed, or remote mutation. Rollback is deleting the results file.
Side effect Runs a bounded set of cheap single-call model samples against variant system prompts and writes a scored results table. No repository mutation.
Done A results table exists comparing each variant against the control on programmatic markers, with every match hand-verified, and the adopted phrasing beats the control on the target metric without regressing the others — or the change is dropped as unmeasurable.

Inputs

  1. Control text (required): the current wording of the rule or instruction being evaluated.
  2. Variant texts (required): one or more proposed rephrasings. Each variant must be a complete, self-contained instruction — not a diff or delta from the control.
  3. Fixture scenario (required): a realistic mid-workflow user message or task prompt that would trigger the rule. Must be specific enough to tempt the failure the instruction targets.
  4. Scoring markers (required): regex patterns or literal strings to search for in model output that indicate compliance or violation. At least one compliance marker and one violation marker.
  5. Target metric (required): which scoring marker the variant must improve over the control.
  6. Sample count (optional, default 5): number of model calls per variant. Minimum 5 for statistical signal.
  7. Model (optional): the model to sample. Must match the model that writes the artifact in production.

Procedure

  1. Classify the instruction. Determine which category the current rule falls into:
    • Tripwire: phrase-level self-check on concrete tokens (e.g., "if your output contains 'do not flag' … stop").
    • Recognition table: red-flags or rationalization table read at decision time.
    • Discrete-directive prohibition: "Do not ask X to do Y" where the model has no competing incentive to do Y.
    • Composition prohibition: a prohibition on how to compose output where the model has its own agenda for the output (e.g., restating specs feels like helpful curation). This classification determines which phrasing strategies are worth testing. Composition prohibitions are the category most likely to backfire; tripwires and recognition tables are the most reliable.

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 lines

Files

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.

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. 3d ago First seen · 73 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 9d2923fddb79

Subscribe to this mod's changes

instruction-phrasing-microtest is a skill published in the GitHub repository OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin (35 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,283 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-04.

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