hypothesis-discipline

hypothesis-discipline is a skill for Claude Code from shinpr/claude-code-discover. It costs 45 tokens per session (851 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A system for managing hypotheses—statements about something believed to be true—through testing, evidence, confidence scores, deadlines, and final conclusions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create hypotheses, define how they will be tested, update confidence, handle time limits, and record results.
Why use it?
It makes assumptions measurable and records whether evidence validates, disproves, or leaves them unresolved.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the discover plugin — 15 skills, 5 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to create hypotheses, define how they will be tested, update…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shinpr/claude-code-discover/hypothesis-discipline
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 shinpr/claude-code-discover --skill hypothesis-discipline
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/shinpr/claude-code-discover

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install discover, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills, 5 agents.

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 hypothesis-discipline

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shinpr/claude-code-discover/hypothesis-discipline.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shinpr/claude-code-discover/hypothesis-discipline)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shinpr/claude-code-discover/hypothesis-discipline"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shinpr/claude-code-discover/hypothesis-discipline.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 851 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 $0.00045 $0.00851
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00426
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00170
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00085

Measured 7d ago against content hash ec7314dc3e8a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hypothesis-discipline 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 7d 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/hypothesis-discipline/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hypothesis Discipline

Core Principle

A hypothesis is not a guess — it is a structured statement with clear validation criteria and a time budget. Every hypothesis must answer: "How will we know if this is true or false?"

Hypothesis Characteristics

  • Hypotheses exist at every level of the OST hierarchy (Outcome → Opportunity → Solution → Assumption)
  • Each hypothesis has a target level attribute indicating which OST level it addresses
  • Hypotheses follow an ADR-style lifecycle — a single file tracks the full journey from draft to conclusion
  • Rejected and invalidated hypotheses remain in their lifecycle file as learning assets

Hypothesis Lifecycle

draft → testing → validated → adopted
                            → rejected (validated but not adopted)
              → invalidated (disproven by evidence)
              → inconclusive (evidence gathered but insufficient to confirm or deny)
              → timeout (deadline passed, decision needed: continue or stop)

Hypothesis File Schema

The authoritative schema is defined in references/hypothesis-template.md. Key fields:

  • id: HYPO-NNN
  • level: outcome / opportunity / solution / assumption
  • status: draft / testing / validated / invalidated / inconclusive / adopted / rejected / timeout
  • confidence: per-risk scores (value, usability, feasibility, viability) on 0-10 scale
  • time-budget and deadline: validation time constraints

Validation Criteria Requirements

Every hypothesis must define before testing begins:

  1. We believe that — the hypothesis statement
  2. We'll know we're right when — measurable success criteria
  3. We'll know we're wrong when — measurable failure criteria
  4. Validation method — how we will test (prototype, data analysis, interview, code spike, market research)
  5. Time budget — maximum time investment before forced decision

Time Budget and Cutoff

  • Every hypothesis gets a time budget (e.g., 1d, 1w, 2w)
  • A deadline sets the hard cutoff date
  • When deadline passes without conclusion → status becomes timeout
  • Timeout forces a decision: extend (with justification), pivot, or abandon
  • Bound every validation with a time budget and deadline so exploration ends in an explicit decision

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 7d ago First seen · 83 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A ec7314dc3e8a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hypothesis-discipline is a skill published in the GitHub repository shinpr/claude-code-discover (10 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 851 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 2026-08-31.

Related

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recipe-validate

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recipe-define

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