reflect-and-improve

reflect-and-improve is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills. It costs 194 tokens per session (2,533 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A review assistant that critiques a newly produced research-paper artifact, such as a rewrite, abstract, rebuttal, or preflight check. It compares the result with the writing goal, paper profile, relevant review criteria, and earlier lessons.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after supported paper-writing skills to review the result, decide whether to keep or revert a change, iterate within a set budget, and record lessons for future drafts.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish a genuinely better revision from wording that is merely different. It can catch regressions before the author keeps an edit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it after supported paper-writing skills to review the result, decide whether to keep or revert a change, iterate within a set budget, and record lessons for future drafts.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve
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 ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills --skill reflect-and-improve
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills

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 reflect-and-improve

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve/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 reflect-and-improve

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/reflect-and-improve.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 194 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,533 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 $0.00194 $0.02533
Opus 5 $0.00097 $0.01267
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.00507
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00253

Measured 13d ago against content hash a2f052c805d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reflect-and-improve 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 13d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/reflect_log.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.

skills/reflect-and-improve/SKILL.md · 211 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 211 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reflect and Improve

A meta-skill that runs after another skill in this toolkit produces an artifact. It asks one question honestly: did the change actually make the paper better, measured against the goal — or did it just make it different? It critiques the new artifact against (a) the goal, (b) the paper's .paper-memory/profile.yml, (c) the rubric that fits the task, and (d) past .paper-memory/lessons.md; iterates within a hard budget; refuses to accept a change that lowers a measurable score; and records what it learned so the next paper starts smarter.

This is a copilot, not a pilot. It proposes; the author decides and edits.

When to use

  • Just after polish-prose, write-rebuttal, write-abstract, preflight-check, tailor-to-venue, draft-related-work, or any skill that emits an artifact, and you want a guarded second pass — "is the new version actually better, or did I introduce a regression?"
  • "Reflect on / critique / self-review this rewrite before I keep it."
  • "Did my edit help?" / "did this get better?" / "should I revert?"
  • To capture a durable lesson ("we keep over-hedging the abstract") so the whole toolkit stops repeating the mistake on this and future papers.

When NOT to use (be honest about cost)

Reflection is an extra LLM pass plus author attention. It only pays off when there is a measurable or rubric-anchored target. Skip it (or keep it to a single quick pass) when:

  • There is no goal to measure against — pure preference edits ("make it sound nicer" with no rubric) reduce to taste; one read is enough.
  • The producing skill already emits a hard score that did not change (e.g. a preflight that was clean before and after). Re-running its checker IS the reflection; do that instead of a narrative critique.
  • The artifact is tiny (a one-line fix). The loop's overhead exceeds its value.

Say this to the user when they ask to reflect on something unmeasurable, then offer the single-pass version.

Inputs

Read the full file on GitHub · 211 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 13d ago First seen · 211 lines · 194 tokens per session scan A a2f052c805d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reflect-and-improve is a skill published in the GitHub repository ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills (42 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 194 tokens to every session and 2,533 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.

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