proof-standard

proof-standard is a skill for Claude Code from svy04/ballast. It costs 44 tokens per session (781 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing rule that requires evidence from a product truth file before making external claims about a product.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing marketing copy, announcements, documentation, landing pages, investor material, or answers about product capabilities.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of describing planned, missing, or unverified features as if they already worked. The file separates code-based evidence from claims based on outside statements.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ballast plugin — 16 skills, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing marketing copy, announcements, documentation, landing pages, investor material, or answers about product capabilities.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/svy04/ballast/proof-standard
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 svy04/ballast --skill proof-standard
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/svy04/ballast

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ballast, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 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 proof-standard

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/svy04/ballast/proof-standard.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/svy04/ballast/proof-standard)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/svy04/ballast/proof-standard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/svy04/ballast/proof-standard.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 781 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 $0.00044 $0.00781
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00391
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00156
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00078

Measured 8d ago against content hash 59bbdafd9831, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

proof-standard 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.

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/proof-standard/SKILL.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Proof standard

External claims about a product come from evidence, not from memory, enthusiasm, or the roadmap. The failure mode this prevents: shipping confident copy about features that don't exist.

The truth file

memory/PRODUCT-TRUTH.md (run brain-init to create it) has three sections:

  1. Implemented — with evidence (code path, test, screenshot) and a date
  2. Not implemented — explicitly listed, so absence is a fact rather than a gap
  3. Permanently excluded — decided against; copy must never imply it

Claims may be sourced only from Implemented.

One truth file per subject you make claims about, split by what kind of evidence is available — code you can read versus someone else's system or word. Name the evidence class at the top of each file, and never let two classes share a section: a line you can settle by opening a path and a line that rests on a vendor's statement do not carry the same weight, and a shared section hides which one you are holding.

Four code states — never blended

State Meaning
implemented The code exists
wired Connected end-to-end (UI → backend → effect)
operational Running in production with real data
verified Tested, with evidence you can point to

Copy that says "we do X" requires operational or better. "X is available" requires at least wired. Everything else is roadmap language — clearly future-tense, clearly conditional. Mixing these states in one sentence is how honest teams end up lying.

Rules

  1. Truth file first. Before any capability claim, open the truth file. No entry → no claim; register an open question instead of guessing.
  2. Evidence and dates on every entry. "It works" is not an entry. "Import wired end-to-end, e2e test passing, 2026-08-01, tests/import.spec.ts" is.
  3. Product changes → truth file first, copy second. Never the reverse order.
  4. Internal is external. The deck you show an investor, the answer you give a partner — same standard. There is no audience for unproven claims.
  5. Absence claims too. "We never store X" is a capability claim about the negative — it also needs a truth-file entry with evidence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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. 8d ago First seen · 50 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 59bbdafd9831

Subscribe to this mod's changes

proof-standard is a skill published in the GitHub repository svy04/ballast (71 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 781 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

alive:demo

Generate a believable, lived-in ALIVE world from a free-text persona description (custom path) or a deterministic sandbox preset. Routes the create/list/activate/deactivate/delete/status surface and orchestrates the 5-stage subagent generation pipeline.

alivecontext/alive · 52 tokens

alive:system-upgrade

Upgrade ALIVE to the current version. Handles v1/v2/v3.x source states, multi-surface aware (alive-mcp / Hermes / Codex), retroactive version detection, partial-failure resume, dry-run previews, and rollback inspection.

alivecontext/alive · 57 tokens

alive:session-history

Revive sessions (quick or heavy), browse, and search — 'what happened recently?', 'find the session where we discussed X', 'revive yesterday's session'. For single-session recall and multi-session browsing. If the human needs to merge multiple sessions into one working context or detect conflicts between parallel…

alivecontext/alive · 76 tokens

alive:world

The human doesn't know what to work on, or wants to see everything at once. They need the big picture — what's active, what's stale, what needs attention. Renders a live world view grouped by ALIVE domain, then routes to open, tidy, find, history, or map.

alivecontext/alive · 63 tokens

alive:mine-for-context

Deep context extraction from source material. Creates reference bundles, builds extraction plans, tracks what's been extracted, and discovers new targets — people, subjects, patterns, connections. The archaeologist that turns raw sources into structured knowledge. Can be invoked by alive:session-history for targeted…

alivecontext/alive · 63 tokens

alive:settings

The human wants to adjust how the system behaves — not what it contains, but how it feels. Voice, rhythm, preferences, walnut-level config, full permissions toggleable, named squirrel config, action logging toggle. The system adapting to them. Routes to preferences.yaml or walnut config.yaml depending on scope. For…

alivecontext/alive · 84 tokens