hypothesis-tree

hypothesis-tree is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills. It costs 97 tokens per session (1,979 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for stating your best early answer to an important question, splitting it into supporting claims, and defining tests that could prove or disprove each claim. Unlike an issue tree, which maps the problem, it starts with a proposed answer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after framing a strategic question to choose what to test first and guide analysis toward a decision.
Why use it?
It keeps research focused and makes it easier to stop pursuing an idea when evidence does not support it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it after framing a strategic question to choose what to test first and guide analysis toward a decision.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree
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 sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills --skill hypothesis-tree
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-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 hypothesis-tree

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree/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 hypothesis-tree

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills/hypothesis-tree.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,979 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00097 $0.01979
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00989
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00396
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00198

Measured 11d ago against content hash 986ad10c7e05, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hypothesis-tree 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 11d 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.

hypothesis-tree/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hypothesis Tree

A hypothesis tree is your Day-1 best guess, structured so you can disprove it fast. Issue trees decompose the question; hypothesis trees commit to an answer and tell you what to go test.

The McKinsey discipline: don't start work without a hypothesis. Otherwise you research forever, find nothing surprising, and produce a "comprehensive overview" no one acts on.


Issue tree vs. hypothesis tree

Issue Tree Hypothesis Tree
Top The question The answer (your guess)
Branches Sub-questions (MECE problem space) Sub-claims that, if true, prove the top claim
Bottom Areas to investigate Specific tests that would kill the claim
Use when You don't know what matters yet You have a strong prior and want to test it efficiently
Risk if skipped You miss a dimension You waste 6 weeks on analysis that doesn't move conviction

Both belong in the consultant toolkit. Issue tree first (frame the space), hypothesis tree second (commit and test). Skipping the hypothesis tree is the #1 reason strategy work takes 3x longer than it should.


Design choices

  • You must commit to a Day-1 answer. "I don't know" is not a hypothesis. Make a guess. Be wrong loudly and fast.
  • 3 sub-hypotheses, not more. If you need 5, your top hypothesis isn't well-formed.
  • Every leaf is a test that could kill the branch. "Do more research" is not a test. "Pull pricing data for 4 competitors and compare to ours" is a test.
  • State conviction explicitly. Each sub-hypothesis gets a confidence (High / Med / Low). Tests focus on the low-conviction branches first — those are where you'll learn the most.
  • Disconfirmation > confirmation. Design tests to kill the hypothesis, not validate it. If you can't think of what would disprove it, you're not testing — you're rationalizing.

Structure

TOP HYPOTHESIS (your Day-1 answer to the governing question)
│
├─ SUB-HYPOTHESIS 1  [confidence: H/M/L]
│  └─ Test: [Specific analysis, named source, kill-criterion]
│
├─ SUB-HYPOTHESIS 2  [confidence: H/M/L]
│  └─ Test: [Specific analysis, named source, kill-criterion]
│
└─ SUB-HYPOTHESIS 3  [confidence: H/M/L]
   └─ Test: [Specific analysis, named source, kill-criterion]

PRIORITY: Test [low-conviction sub] first. Kill-criterion: [what result makes us abandon the top hypothesis].

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 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. 11d ago First seen · 151 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 986ad10c7e05

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hypothesis-tree is a skill published in the GitHub repository sruthir28/enterprise-ai-skills (139 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 1,979 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.