maieutic

maieutic is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Shogo1222/socratic. It costs 131 tokens per session (3,514 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for turning a code change into a confirmed description of intended behavior and a focused unit-test plan.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect diffs, record decisions in an intent contract, review tests, design missing cases, run them, and prepare test handoffs.
Why use it?
It helps separate what the code currently does from what it is supposed to do, while asking only questions that affect observable results or side effects.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the socratic plugin — 3 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to inspect diffs, record decisions in an intent contract, review tests, design missing cases, run them, and prepare test handoffs.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic
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 Shogo1222/socratic --skill maieutic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Shogo1222/socratic

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install socratic, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 3 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 maieutic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic/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 maieutic

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shogo1222/socratic/maieutic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 131 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,514 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 $0.00131 $0.03514
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01757
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00703
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00351

Measured 10d ago against content hash e6278b8da408, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

maieutic 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 10d 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/maieutic/SKILL.md · 227 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 227 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maieutic

Turn a code diff into a small set of human decisions and a validated, executable unit-test contract. Treat code as evidence of intent, never as the final specification.

Required references

Read references/intent-contract.md before recording decisions. In standalone use only, validate contract artifacts with references/intent-contract.schema.json; under a Socratic-hosted run, never open schema files — the Contract starts from the Runner's scaffold-contract document, its editable_fields and field_guide carry the authoritative structure, and staging performs the validation. Read references/qa-techniques.md when selecting test cases.

When receiving or preparing a proven-test handoff, also read Proven Test Handoff. Elenchus owns its mutation evidence and patch artifact; Maieutic owns whether its mapped expectations are confirmed and still current.

Operating rules

  • Ask only when different reasonable answers change an observable expectation or important side effect.
  • Do not ask for facts discoverable from repository instructions, issues, authoritative documentation, call sites, history, or reviewed evidence.
  • Distinguish observed behavior, inferred intent, confirmed intent, and unresolved intent.
  • Prefer a concrete behavior comparison over an abstract specification question.
  • Optimize for human review cost as well as risk. Make each question quick to answer.
  • Do not change production behavior to make a test pass unless the user separately authorizes a fix.
  • Add tests only for confirmed expectations. Never freeze a suspected bug into a regression test.

Human decision interaction

When a decision changes an important observable oracle:

  1. Prefer the host's structured user-question tool when available — AskUserQuestion on Claude Code, request_user_input on Codex.
  2. Ask one to three questions per batch, each with two or three mutually exclusive options and single selection by default.
  3. Give each option a label and a one-sentence observable consequence, state the oracle the answer changes, and mark a recommended option when one exists.
  4. Always allow a free-form answer; the specification owner may state a different expectation.
  5. When no structured tool is available, render the same question as copyable Markdown with lettered options.
  6. Ask from the main agent only; structured question tools are unavailable in subagents. Subagents may investigate, run tests, and execute mutations, and must return open decisions to the main agent.
  7. Persist every answer and its provenance in the Intent Contract before acting on it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 227 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. 10d ago First seen · 227 lines · 131 tokens per session scan A e6278b8da408

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maieutic is a skill published in the GitHub repository Shogo1222/socratic (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 131 tokens to every session and 3,514 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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