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.
npx agentmods add skills/technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins/gut-checknpx skills add technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins --skill gut-checkgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/technicalpickles/pickled-claude-pluginsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins/gut-check)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins/gut-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins/gut-check.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00106 | $0.00890 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00053 | $0.00445 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00178 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00089 |
Grade A, and why
gut-check 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 5d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 80 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Gut Check
The spine
Don't lock in a decision or assert a fact from a thin basis: memory, the handoff, the first framing, an unexamined pick. Ground it first, then proceed.
Violating the letter of this is violating the spirit of it. "I'm confident, so I can skip the check" is the exact failure this skill exists to catch.
When this fires
You are about to do one of these AND the basis is thin (not verified this session):
- Lock in a non-trivial or hard-to-reverse decision
- Fire AskUserQuestion to offload a decision you could ground yourself
- Proceed on your own preferred option without weighing alternatives
- Assert something is done / found / tested / fixed / "that's how X works"
Skip it for trivial, reversible steps, and for claims already backed by output you produced this turn. When unsure whether it's trivial, it isn't, engage.
Shared opening (both modes)
Name the thin basis in one line: "I'm about to [decide X / claim Y] based on [memory / the handoff / first framing / my own pick]." Naming it is what flips you from asserting to grounding.
Then pick the mode: grounding a decision → DECIDE. Grounding a fact → VERIFY.
DECIDE mode
- Validity gate. For each option, is it even real/valid? Drop the bogus ones.
- Consult existing context. Read the relevant ADRs, docs, code, prior decisions. The answer is often already settled there, don't reason in a vacuum.
- Per-option tradeoffs. One by one: pros/cons, plus effort (easier/harder) and durability (long-run). Not a blurry summary.
- Ranked recommendation. State a lean and why, give something to react to.
- Hand the call back. Surface the recommendation; let the user decide. Do the thinking; don't offload the thinking, and don't seize the deciding.
VERIFY mode
- State the claim precisely. "I'm claiming X is done/found/true."
- Check it this session. Read the file, run the command, grep the evidence. Memory and the handoff do not count.
- Report grounded. "Confirmed, here's the evidence" / "No, not actually done" / "Partial: X yes, Y no." Show the receipt.
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.
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 80 lines · 106 tokens per session scan A 17b5e8daa81f
gut-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository technicalpickles/pickled-claude-plugins (10 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 890 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 2026-08-31.
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