paperless-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

.agents/skills/designing-tool-outcomes/SKILL.md

designing-tool-outcomes is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp. It costs 70 tokens per session (2,213 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of designing-tool-outcomes, MIT.

A design guide for deciding how an MCP tool reports successful results, ordinary problems, empty findings, conflicts, and server failures. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is a way for AI agents to call external tools.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for writing MCP tool contracts, error messages, and log levels when a tool can fail, refuse a request, find nothing, or encounter a conflict.
Why use it?
It prevents every unsuccessful result from being treated as a server crash or every failure from being returned as if the tool succeeded. Clear outcome and error messages tell the agent what to do next.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents).

This is pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp's own configuration. It tells Claude Code and Codex how to work on paperless-mcp itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything paperless-mcp configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp. 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/pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp/main/.agents/skills/designing-tool-outcomes/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp

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.

agentmods badge for designing-tool-outcomes

README.md
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Your own site
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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 designing-tool-outcomes

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp/designing-tool-outcomes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp/designing-tool-outcomes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,213 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 100% 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00070 $0.02213
Opus 5.5 $0.00028 $0.00885
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00014 $0.00443
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00221

Measured 25d ago against content hash c11df839a833, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

designing-tool-outcomes 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 25d 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

100% identical to designing-tool-outcomes — 0 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/designing-tool-outcomes/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Designing tool outcomes

A tool call ends in one of four outcomes. Classify each case before you write its code. The class fixes three things at once: what the model receives, what the message tells it to do next, and the log level. The evidence behind every rule is in docs/design/reference/mcp-tool-outcomes-and-errors.md and docs/design/reference/negative-outcomes-and-faults.md.

The four outcomes

The contract is what the tool's description and return type promise. An outcome that fits the contract is a result. An outcome that cannot produce the promised thing is an error, however ordinary it is. The two texts split the work: the description states the contract, limits that hold for every call included, and never lists failures (writing-model-facing-text, "The contract, not the failures"). So the error text is the one place a failure is explained, and it has to stand on its own.

# Outcome Examples Code The message tells the model Log
1 Contract met the note's text; an empty list from a search that ran to completion return the value nothing extra the middleware's completion line
2 Change the request no note at that path; invalid input; path outside the store; write refused until if_match is passed; a feature this deployment leaves off (a read-only vault, an opt-in feature not enabled) raise ToolError(msg, log_level=logging.INFO) what was wrong and what to call or pass instead; repeating the same call will not help INFO
3 Refresh, then retry stale version or etag; conflicting concurrent change raise ToolError(msg, log_level=logging.INFO) read again, reapply the change, retry with the new token INFO
4 The server failed I/O error; permissions on the server's own files; a stored file the server cannot parse; index or dependency unavailable; required configuration left out; a bug let it reach the boundary, or raise ToolError(msg) after logging the request was fine; retry later (transient) or tell the user (needs an operator); do not change strategy WARNING if it heals itself, else ERROR with the traceback

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 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. 25d ago First seen · 152 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A c11df839a833

Subscribe to this mod's changes

designing-tool-outcomes is a skill published in the GitHub repository pvliesdonk/paperless-mcp (1 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 2,213 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to designing-tool-outcomes, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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