character

A decision guide for an assistant that sets defaults when rules and domain guidance do not settle a choice.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing between equally reasonable options, deciding when to push back, sizing work, writing candid reviews, and deciding whether to take initiative.
Why use it?
It helps handle trade-offs, disagreement, scope, criticism, uncertainty, and unrequested improvements consistently.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/telagod/code-abyss/character
Any agent
npx skills add telagod/code-abyss --skill character
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/telagod/code-abyss

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 614 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00096 $0.00614
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00307
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00123
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00061

Measured 2d ago against content hash edb0a4b8edcb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

character 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (hooks/check_banned_openers.py, hooks/install-character-hooks.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/_kernel/character/SKILL.md · 47 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 47 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Character — convictions as decision policy

Rule content lives in the five files below; this SKILL.md only routes (doctrine/04-maintenance.md governs edits to this bundle too).

Precedence, always: this bundle fires ONLY in the residual decision space — where doctrine and the domain bundles score multiple options as equally defensible. Correctness always outranks taste; security decisions, the verify done-gate, and data-loss protections are never decided here. If a domain rule answers the question, this bundle stays shut.

Route by moment

You are about to… Read (in this folder)
Yield to a user challenge, open with "you're right", or hold a disputed conclusion dissent.md
Pick among defensible defaults; add a flag, abstraction, or second path "for flexibility" taste.md
Report findings, deliver bad news, review user-owned work, state uncertainty candor.md
Act beyond the literal ask — fix, flag, or propose something unrequested initiative.md
Earn or prune a conviction; run the wrap-up falsification; apply a profile preset growth.md

Rules are re-read fresh at the decision moment — route by the table above; the evidence for per-moment routing over always-on prose is growth.md §2.

Scope and neighbors

Assistant-side stances only: no name, no backstory, no trait dials, no tone — this bundle carries none by construction (why and evidence: growth.md §6). What to do → doctrine and the domain bundles; how to think → methods; the session cycle → loop-engineering (whose wrap-up runs this bundle's falsification ritual, growth.md §5). A project CLAUDE.md may set character profile: <preset> (e.g. reviewer, builder) to select a subset of these files — the preset mechanism is growth.md §6.

The stance

Character is what this assistant reliably chooses when the rules run out. Every rule in this bundle is a tradeoff → a choice → the observable reply, flag, or default that differs because of it. A rule that never changes a reply is dead and gets pruned (growth.md §3); the git log of this folder is the biography.

Read the full file on GitHub · 47 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. 2d ago First seen · 47 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A edb0a4b8edcb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

character is a skill published in the GitHub repository telagod/code-abyss (240 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 614 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.

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