high-stakes

high-stakes is a skill for Claude Code from titusz/skills. It costs 173 tokens per session (2,907 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A verification workflow that assigns independent critics to challenge code, writing, research, operations, or other work for specific types of failure.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when the consequences of an error are important and you want repeated adversarial checks before delivery.
Why use it?
It reduces the chance that hidden assumptions, conceptual mistakes, inconsistencies, or unnecessary complexity survive into the final result.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the high-stakes plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it when the consequences of an error are important and you want repeated adversarial checks before delivery.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes
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 titusz/skills --skill high-stakes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/titusz/skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install high-stakes, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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 high-stakes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes/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 high-stakes

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/titusz/skills/high-stakes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 173 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,907 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.
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 $0.00173 $0.02907
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.01453
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00581
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00291

Measured 3d ago against content hash 53e51bc4b811, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

high-stakes 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 3d 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.

plugins/high-stakes/skills/high-stakes/SKILL.md · 178 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 178 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

High-Stakes

The task to execute is in $ARGUMENTS. Treat that text as the work to deliver, not as a description to discuss.

If $ARGUMENTS is empty (a bare /high-stakes, or "do this carefully" said about work already in the conversation), the task is the most recent concrete request in the conversation. Name it explicitly in your plan and confirm it before executing - never run the gauntlet against an empty task.

The organizing principle is watch like a hawk: a smart, hasty result is the default output of any single agent, and its mistakes are no longer typos - they are subtle conceptual errors a sloppy junior would make. The executor that wrote the artifact is its worst judge, so nothing it produces is trusted until independent skeptics try to break it and fail. Your job is to define what "correct and clean" means for this task, then loop that adversarial gauntlet until it comes back empty - agents do not tire, so the looping against a fixed target is the leverage.

The ten failure modes you are defending against

These are the specific bugs the skeptics hunt for. Every verifier maps to one. The plan-first gate (step 2) targets modes 1–6, where a guess becomes invisible the moment you write confident prose over it; execution and the gauntlet (steps 3–4) target modes 7–10.

  1. silent-assumptions - filled an underspecified detail (path, data shape, edge case, version, default) with a guess and built on it without stating it. The most common failure.
  2. unmanaged-confusion - hit genuine uncertainty and picked the first reading instead of asking.
  3. hidden-inconsistencies - found a contradiction (spec vs. code, conflicting requirements) and silently picked a side instead of surfacing it.
  4. unsurfaced-tradeoffs - several viable approaches existed; committed to one as if inevitable.
  5. no-pushback - implemented a flawed premise faithfully instead of challenging it.
  6. sycophancy - reflexive agreement and praise standing in for honest judgment.
  7. subtle-conceptual-errors - compiles/reads clean but is wrong: off-by-one, bad boundary, misused API semantics, race, broken invariant.
  8. overcomplication - 1000 lines where 100 would do; layers and knobs with one caller.
  9. dead-code - leftover scaffolding, unused symbols, commented-out blocks, dead branches.
  10. orthogonal-damage - touched, reformatted, or deleted code/comments unrelated to the task.

Read the full file on GitHub · 178 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 3d ago Changed 53e51bc4b811
  2. 9d ago First seen · 178 lines · 173 tokens per session scan A a660e24f7196

Subscribe to this mod's changes

high-stakes is a skill published in the GitHub repository titusz/skills (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 173 tokens to every session and 2,907 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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