methods

A general problem-solving guide for software work, covering investigation, design, execution, verification, and communication.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to debug root causes, plan and evaluate approaches, run longer tasks, review results or conflicting reports, and write actionable technical guidance.
Why use it?
It helps you work through confusing behavior and multi-step changes systematically, while checking that the result and its explanation are sound.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 467 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 $0.00073 $0.00467
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00234
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00093
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00047

Measured yesterday against content hash 4b117317b434, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

methods 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 yesterday.

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/methods/SKILL.md · 34 lines

What it actually says

Methods — how to think, by moment

Five domains, each distilled from moves a stronger model actually made (the examples cite real founding-session events; most are verifiable in the repo — git log, the doctrine files, archive/ — and the rest come from the founding session's own recorded account). Governance — whether to delegate, escalate, stop, or claim done — lives in the doctrine skill; this bundle is how to work the problem once you're in it.

Route by moment

You are about to… Read (in this folder)
Investigate a bug, a confusing behavior, an unfamiliar system, an anomaly investigate.md
Propose, design, or evaluate an approach (incl. someone else's suggestion) design.md
Start a task with more than ~3 steps, or one that could be interrupted execute.md
Check work — yours or a reviewer's; weigh conflicting reports verify.md
Write anything another model or person must act on (rules, reports, docs) communicate.md

Read the ONE file that matches; each is self-contained. If two match (e.g. designing a verification), read both — they're short. When a task fires this bundle AND doctrine (e.g. "review this PR" is both a delegation decision and a verification method): doctrine FIRST — decide whether and to whom to delegate — then the matching methods file for how to do the work.

The stance that generates all five

Every belief is either verified this session or hearsay — the labeling discipline and the rest of the stance live in investigate.md §3, which is their single home.

Files

What ships with it

5 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. yesterday First seen · 34 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 4b117317b434

Subscribe to this mod's changes

methods is a skill published in the GitHub repository telagod/code-abyss (240 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 467 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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