frustration-detection

frustration-detection is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills. It costs 31 tokens per session (1,152 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to recognising signs that a user is becoming frustrated from their wording, punctuation, repetition, timing, or requests for help.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to detect urgency, anger, repeated questions, doubt, profanity, or sudden changes in the user's messages.
Why use it?
It helps an AI respond appropriately before the user gives up or asks to speak to a person.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the model-interaction-design plugin — 8 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to detect urgency, anger, repeated questions, doubt, profanity, or sudden changes in the user's messages.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection
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 Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills --skill frustration-detection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install model-interaction-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 3 commands.

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 frustration-detection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection/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 frustration-detection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/ai-design-skills/frustration-detection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,152 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 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 $0.00031 $0.01152
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00576
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00230
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00115

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4a8da34b980f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

frustration-detection 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 12d 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.

claude-plugin/model-interaction-design/skills/frustration-detection/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Frustration Detection

Most AI products treat every user message as having the same emotional weight. They don't. "Cancel my subscription." and "PLEASE just cancel my subscription!!!" deserve different responses. Frustration detection is the perception skill that picks up the signal so the rest of the system can adapt.

This is the unnamed skill that sits behind tone calibration, escalation design, and graceful repair. Without it, those skills can't fire at the right moment.

Signals

Linguistic

  • Capitalisation shifts: ALL CAPS, sudden "PLEASE", "URGENT"
  • Punctuation density: ?!?!, ...., multiple !!
  • Hedge-stripping: terse, demand-form ("just fix it", "stop")
  • Repetition: same concept restated across turns
  • Profanity (mild or strong)

Structural

  • Decreasing turn latency (rapid-fire replies)
  • Increasing turn latency past a threshold (walk-away)
  • Re-asking the same question after a response
  • Explicit human-handoff request ("speak to a person")
  • Sudden topic switches

Lexical / affect

  • Negative affect words ("useless", "annoying", "broken")
  • Time-pressure words ("now", "immediately", "deadline")
  • Doubt words ("really?", "are you sure", "is that right")
  • Disengagement words ("never mind", "forget it", "whatever", "fine")

Detection should be cumulative across signals and turns, not single-feature.

Decision rules

  • One signal is noise; two is a pattern. Don't act on a single CAPS message; act when CAPS plus repetition appear.
  • If frustration is rising AND the AI has already attempted a fix once, escalate. Don't reach for a third rephrase.
  • Urgency without frustration ≠ frustration. Speed up; don't change tone.
  • Long latency after a long AI response is a walk-away, not deep reading. Save state, offer re-engagement, don't continue.
  • Adapt silently. Don't name the emotion. "I sense you're frustrated" is patronising. Lower confidence, slow pace, raise warmth — but in the prose, not the meta-commentary.

Anti-patterns

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 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. 12d ago First seen · 92 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 4a8da34b980f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

frustration-detection is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/ai-design-skills (172 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 1,152 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.