five-hard

five-hard is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit. It costs 77 tokens per session (905 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A recurring exercise in which an AI asks five challenging questions about the owner's long-held beliefs and notes. It is meant to test whether old assumptions still hold.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it monthly or on demand to identify stagnant notes and create specific questions that could expose weak or outdated assumptions.
Why use it?
It helps prevent beliefs and written principles from going unexamined for too long.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the second-brain-skills plugin — 57 skills shipped together

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/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit/five-hard
Any agent
npx skills add tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit --skill five-hard
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install second-brain-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills.

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 five-hard

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit/five-hard.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit/five-hard)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit/five-hard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit/five-hard.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 905 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 $0.00077 $0.00905
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00452
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00181
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00090

Measured 4d ago against content hash 349f5f89a739, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

five-hard 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 4d 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/five-hard/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/five-hard — five hard questions

🧒 When reporting to a non-technical operator, end with a child-simple "In plain words" recap in their language.

Why: the identity layer (belief-* + concept-bible-*, ~24 notes) is "how I think". That gets dangerous once part of it is wrong and nobody has checked. Here the brain itself starts the pressure-test.

Run

python "$IMPORTS_ROOT/five_hard_pick.py" -> the 5 most stagnant notes (oldest mtime) -> $IMPORTS_ROOT/_five_hard_pick.json. Override: env FIVE_HARD_N=7.

The questions (top-model quality — identity synthesis, not grunt work)

Read each note IN FULL and give ONE hard question per note:

N. **[<stem>]** — <the owner's thesis in your own words>
   Question: <sharp, Socratic, capable of forcing a rethink>
   Why it is hard: <which counter-fact or trend could flip it>

Style: Socratic — not "you are wrong" but "what makes you sure today?"; lean on CONCRETE recent signals; epistemic-neutrality; aim at the UNTESTED edge (the "tension / nuance" section), not at the part already reflected on. "The rule still stands" is a valid answer (bible-as-prompt).

Recording the answer (long memory; backup-first: vault_backup.py)

-> $OBSIDIAN_VAULT/04-Coach/_Five-Hard/five-hard-YYYY-MM-DD.md Frontmatter: title, date, type: five-hard, source: claude-session, tags: [five-hard, coach, identity-layer]. Body: the questions + the owner's answers verbatim; if they changed position, propose a diff to the belief/bible note with supersedes: (via /intake). NO 🧒 block inside the note.

Scheduled twin

Cron five-hard-monthly: 1st of the month, 05:25 Lisbon (the briefing window, routines-run-at-night). Picker -> questions (top-model subagent) -> the fleet log chat via python $USERPROFILE/.claude/scripts/bus_ping.py --post "..." (canon: alerts go to the fleet log chat, never to Saved Messages) + "answer by voice or text, I will file it into the vault". The manual twin is this skill; the single source of truth is the picker.

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 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. 4d ago First seen · 62 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 349f5f89a739

Subscribe to this mod's changes

five-hard is a skill published in the GitHub repository tonydzi/second-brain-starter-kit (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 905 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 2026-08-31.

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