chestertons-fence

chestertons-fence is a skill for Claude Code from rjmurillo/ai-agents. It costs 80 tokens per session (1,428 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An investigation method for finding why existing code, architecture decisions, rules, or workflows were created before changing or removing them. It uses project history, pull requests, architecture decision records (ADRs), and dependency information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate code history, understand architectural decisions, assess proposed removals, and document the reasoning behind existing structures.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of deleting a constraint or pattern whose original purpose is not obvious from the current code.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the project-toolkit plugin — 113 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate code history, understand architectural decisions, assess proposed removals, and document the reasoning behind existing structures.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence
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 rjmurillo/ai-agents --skill chestertons-fence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rjmurillo/ai-agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 113 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks.

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 chestertons-fence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence/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 chestertons-fence

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/chestertons-fence.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,428 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Prompt Injection · line 146
    Hidden instructions were detected in comments or invisible text. These could contain malicious directives. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Audit all comments and invisible characters. Remove any instructions that direct the agent to perform unauthorized actions. Use plain, reviewable content.
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 $0.00080 $0.01428
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00714
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00286
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00143

Measured 8d ago against content hash d4e6c9609102, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

chestertons-fence 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/investigate.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/skills/chestertons-fence/SKILL.md · 147 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 147 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chesterton's Fence Investigation

Enforce epistemic humility before changing existing systems. Understand original purpose before proposing changes.

Quick Start

# Investigate why code exists before changing it
/chestertons-fence "path/to/file.py" "remove unused validation"

# Investigate an ADR before deprecating it
/chestertons-fence "docs/architecture/ADR-005.md" "allow bash scripts"

Triggers

Phrase Context
why does this exist Investigating existing code or patterns
chestertons fence Explicit investigation request
before removing Planning deletion or replacement
investigate history Researching original rationale
prior art investigation ADR-required investigation

Quick Reference

Input Output Destination
File path or ADR number Investigation report .agents/analysis/NNN-chestertons-fence-TOPIC.md
Component description Historical context summary stdout (JSON)

When to Use

Use this skill BEFORE proposing changes to existing:

  • Code patterns or architectural decisions
  • ADRs, constraints, or protocol rules
  • Workflow configurations or CI pipelines
  • Skills, hooks, or agent prompts

Process

1. Identify Structure       What exists? Where is it defined?
       |
       v
2. Git Archaeology          git log, git blame to find origin commit
       |
       v
3. PR/ADR Search            Find the PR or ADR with original rationale
       |
       v
4. Dependency Analysis      What references or depends on this?
       |
       v
5. Generate Report          Fill the investigation template
       |
       v
6. Decision                 REMOVE | MODIFY | PRESERVE | REPLACE

Step Details

Step 1: Identify Structure. Locate the exact file, function, pattern, or constraint under investigation. Record its current form.

Step 2: Git Archaeology. Run git log --follow and git blame on the target. Identify the commit that introduced it, the author, and the date.

Read the full file on GitHub · 147 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 8d ago First seen · 147 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A d4e6c9609102

Subscribe to this mod's changes

chestertons-fence is a skill published in the GitHub repository rjmurillo/ai-agents (45 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,428 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.

Related

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