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 skills add tupe12334/instinct --skill north-star-metricgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tupe12334/instinctWrote 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/tupe12334/instinct/north-star-metric)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/north-star-metric"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/north-star-metric/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/north-star-metric"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/north-star-metric.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00023 | $0.02452 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00012 | $0.01226 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00005 | $0.00490 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00245 |
Grade A, and why
north-star-metric 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 12d 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 — 163 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
North Star Metric
Overview
The North Star Metric (NSM) is the single number that best represents the core value your product delivers to customers. It acts as a shared compass: when the NSM goes up, the business grows sustainably; when it stagnates, no amount of revenue growth is safe. Everything the team ships should be traceable to moving this one number.
┌─────────────────────────────┐
│ NORTH STAR METRIC │
│ (customer value delivered) │
└──────────────┬──────────────┘
│
┌──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┐
│ │ │
┌──────┴──────┐ ┌───────┴──────┐ ┌──────┴──────┐
│ Input #1 │ │ Input #2 │ │ Input #3 │
│ (Breadth) │ │ (Depth) │ │ (Frequency) │
└─────────────┘ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
Revenue is an output, not a North Star.
The NSM causes revenue — it is not caused by it.
Core Components
The North Star Metric
One metric, owned by the whole company, that measures how much value customers are getting. It must be:
- Customer-centric — tracks an outcome customers care about, not an internal output
- Leading — predicts long-term retention and revenue, not just current revenue
- Actionable — teams can run experiments that plausibly move it
- Singular — if you have two NSMs, you have zero
| Company | North Star Metric |
|---|---|
| Spotify | Time spent listening per user per day |
| Airbnb | Nights booked |
| Slack | Messages sent per active team |
| Duolingo | Daily active learners |
| HubSpot | Contacts managed by paying customers |
Input Metrics (Leading Indicators)
3–5 metrics that collectively drive the NSM. They decompose the NSM into levers teams can directly influence. A useful decomposition covers:
- Breadth — how many users reach the value moment
- Depth — how much value each user gets per session
- Frequency — how often users return to get value
- Efficiency — how quickly or cheaply value is delivered
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 163 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 930c89343e22
north-star-metric is a skill published in the GitHub repository tupe12334/instinct (1 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 2,452 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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