Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to VGrss/Acumen. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VGrss/Acumen/main/.agents/skills/scout/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/VGrss/AcumenWrote 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/vgrss/acumen/scout)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vgrss/acumen/scout"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vgrss/acumen/scout/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/vgrss/acumen/scout"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vgrss/acumen/scout.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 | $0.00044 | $0.01518 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00607 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00304 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00152 |
Grade A, and why
scout 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 2mo 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 — 155 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
MANDATORY PREPARATION
Invoke /product-thinking — it contains product principles and the Context Gathering Protocol. Follow the protocol before proceeding — if no product context exists yet, you MUST run /teach-acumen first.
Mindset: Competitors are everyone hired for the same job — not just companies with similar feature lists. A spreadsheet is a competitor. Doing nothing is a competitor. The intern who does it manually is a competitor.
Competition is about who else gets hired for the job, not who has more checkmarks on a feature matrix. Users don't compare products in a vacuum — they compare the pain of switching against the pain of staying.
Behavior
When called with a specific competitor or market area: Research and add/update that entry in the map. Ask the user what they know, what prompted the scout, and what they're worried about.
When called without argument: Review the full map for staleness and gaps. Flag competitors that haven't been updated recently. Identify missing entrants.
When called with "deep [competitor]" or for strategic decisions: Switch to deep analysis mode (see below).
Research Process (Standard Mode)
- Read
.acumen.mdfor product context — users, job to be done, strategy, deliberate exclusions - Read
.acumen/competitors.mdfor existing map - For each competitor (new or updated), gather:
- Their website URL
- Their category: Direct (same job, same approach), Indirect (same job, different approach), or Adjacent (different job, overlapping users)
- What job they're hired for (may overlap partially with yours)
- How they position themselves
- Their actual strengths (not what they claim — what users would say)
- Their real weaknesses (not surface-level — structural ones)
- Their moat (network effects, data, switching costs, brand, distribution)
- Recent moves (launches, pivots, pricing changes, acquisitions)
- Assess feature parity traps — features competitors have that you might reflexively copy but shouldn't
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 155 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 55bf47b7ef53
scout is a skill published in the GitHub repository VGrss/Acumen (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 1,518 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
scout compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| scoutVGrss/Acumen | Skill | 12 | 3mo ago | Apache-2.0 | A | 44 | Claude Code |
| imagegenopenai/codex | Skill | 133k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 113 | Codex |
| playwright-climicrosoft/playwright | Skill | 99k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners | Skill | 79k | 4d ago | MIT | A | 200 | Claude Code, Codex |
| systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers | Skill | 313k | 3d ago | MIT | A | 21 | Claude Code |
| next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 95 | Claude Code |
| next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 103 | Claude Code |