hard-cheese

hard-cheese is a skill for Claude Code from paulnsorensen/easy-cheese. It costs 67 tokens per session (2,918 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review gate that asks the author to explain the cause-and-effect logic of a code change before sharing it for review. It uses the SOLO Taxonomy, a framework for judging how deeply someone understands a subject.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before pushing or opening a review to record an explanation, have it judged against a chosen understanding level, and optionally log the explanation without judging it.
Why use it?
It helps reveal code that passes tests but that its author cannot explain clearly to reviewers.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} variable. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 skills/hard-cheese/scripts/hard-cheese.pyz freshness-check \.

Part of the easy-cheese plugin — 18 skills shipped together

not rated 18repo changed 5d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 67 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it before pushing or opening a review to record an explanation, have it judged against a chosen understanding level, and optionally log the explanation without judging it.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install easy-cheese, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 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 hard-cheese

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese/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 hard-cheese

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/paulnsorensen/easy-cheese/hard-cheese.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,918 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
  • Socket pass 12 Jun 2026
  • Snyk pass 29 May 2026
  • 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 $0.00067 $0.02918
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01459
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00584
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00292

Measured 5d ago against content hash a0dbb9b30db5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hard-cheese 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 5d 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/hard-cheese/SKILL.md · 231 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 231 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/hard-cheese

The gate reduces epistemic debt. This debt exists when code passes checks, but the author cannot explain it.

Inputs

/hard-cheese [<slug>] [--socratic-cap N=3] [--passing-score N=3] [--no-judge]

Arguments:

  • <slug> identifies the artifact at .cheese/hard-cheese/<slug>.md. This argument is optional. Without it, use the short SHA of HEAD. An explicit slug overrides the SHA.
  • --socratic-cap N sets the maximum number of retries. The gate then marks the artifact FAILED and returns a non-zero status. The default is 3. Vibecheck has no limit, but easy-cheese prevents infinite loops.
  • --passing-score N sets the minimum SOLO score for PASS. Use a value from 1 through 5. The default is 3. The gate treats a previous PASS below this value as stale.
  • --no-judge enables log-only mode. Record the user's explanation with status: LOGGED. Do not start the judge sub-agent. This mode is the easy-cheese equivalent of the optional JSONL telemetry mode in vibecheck. It retains more content. See ## Divergence from the paper.

Invocation modes

Mode How the gate runs Where the gate sits
standalone The user runs /hard-cheese <slug> before a pull request. Outside the pipeline. No upstream skill is required.
propagated /plate --hard runs /hard-cheese <slug> after the final writes and before publication. At the verified-artifacts to share-for-review boundary.

--hard passes through /cheese → /mold → /cook → /press → /age → /cure → /plate. Only /plate runs /hard-cheese.

See ../cheese/references/harness-portability.md for portability requirements. It covers helper resolution, sub-agent dispatch, GitHub operations, and handoff transitions. Use the bundle or repository helper first. Use ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} only as an optional host fallback. The handoff blocks define the portable contract because slash commands are host renderings, not the control model.

Read the full file on GitHub · 231 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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.

  1. 5d ago Changed · +25 lines · -69 tokens per session a0dbb9b30db5
  2. 11d ago First seen · 206 lines · 136 tokens per session scan A 558a14c49344

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hard-cheese is a skill published in the GitHub repository paulnsorensen/easy-cheese (18 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,918 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 2026-08-30.