compare-trajectories

compare-trajectories is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools. It costs 100 tokens per session (2,514 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for comparing the step-by-step behavior of two or more model runs on the same tasks. It reads saved trajectory files, which are records of an agent's messages, tool calls, and results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Diffing model trajectories, aligning runs by task, classifying behavioral gaps, and finding clean example runs for further evaluation or training.
Why use it?
A final score shows that runs differ but not why. This comparison identifies whether the gap comes from persistence, recovery, knowledge, or formatting and parsing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the understudy plugin — 43 skills, 1 command 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/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/compare-trajectories
Any agent
npx skills add understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools --skill compare-trajectories
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install understudy, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 43 skills, 1 command.

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 compare-trajectories

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/compare-trajectories.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/compare-trajectories)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/compare-trajectories"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/compare-trajectories.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,514 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 $0.00100 $0.02514
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.01257
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00503
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00251

Measured 4d ago against content hash f2ce21567658, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

compare-trajectories 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/render-logprob-compare.mjs), 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/compare-trajectories/SKILL.md · 173 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 173 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Compare Trajectories

Use this worker when ../compare-model-sweep/SKILL.md has already told you that model A and model B score differently on a frozen eval, and the next question — the one that decides whether to spend RL budget — is HOW their trajectories differ, step by step, on the same tasks. A pass-rate delta is a scalar; it cannot tell you whether the stronger model wins because it tries longer, because it knew the right endpoint, or because the weaker model's tool-calls were malformed. Those three answers point at three different fixes — RL, retrieval/world-knowledge, or decoding/prompt — and only a per-task trajectory diff separates them.

This skill aligns two (or more) run exports by task id, builds the outcome-delta matrix, computes behavioral divergence on shared tasks, classifies each reachable-gap task, and counts how many clean warm-start trajectories the comparison yields. It reads trajectory JSON that already exists on disk; it does not run models. To produce the trajectories, run ../run-local-model-lab/SKILL.md or ../compare-model-sweep/SKILL.md first.

Safety Gates

  • Local-first, no upload. Trajectory exports contain full message bodies and tool I/O. Keep the diff, the matrix, and the report under .understudy/; do not paste trajectories or task content into external services.
  • Flag small N. A reachable-gap set of 3 tasks is an anecdote, not a capability claim. State the shared-task count and the per-class count on every verdict, and refuse to generalize below a stated floor (default N<10 → "directional only").
  • Segregate frozen holdout. If either export includes holdout/frozen rows, say so and split the matrix into train/dev vs holdout sections — never warm-start from holdout trajectories, and never report a holdout-derived gap as a training signal. Prefer a hash-stamped selection from ../curate-trajectories/SKILL.md.
  • No vibes. "B is better" must be backed by the per-task matrix and the divergence metrics, never by reading a few transcripts. The gap classification is a hypothesis to confirm, not proof — label it as such.
  • Make all token/cost/step claims from the export fields, not memory.

Read the full file on GitHub · 173 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 4d ago First seen · 173 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A f2ce21567658

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compare-trajectories is a skill published in the GitHub repository understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools (16 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 2,514 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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