failure-essence

failure-essence is a skill for Claude Code from VoxTechnologies/anty-framework. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,392 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for finding common strategic failure patterns before they cause damage. It examines conflicting goals, vague plans, stop decisions, and the sources behind key assumptions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to test whether objectives conflict, make plans operational, set conditions for stopping or restarting work, and audit assumption evidence.
Why use it?
It makes hidden conflicts and weak assumptions visible before they lead to wasted work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the anty plugin — 24 skills, 11 commands, 4 agents 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/voxtechnologies/anty-framework/failure-essence
Any agent
npx skills add VoxTechnologies/anty-framework --skill failure-essence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/VoxTechnologies/anty-framework

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install anty, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills, 11 commands, 4 agents.

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 failure-essence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/voxtechnologies/anty-framework/failure-essence.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/voxtechnologies/anty-framework/failure-essence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/voxtechnologies/anty-framework/failure-essence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/voxtechnologies/anty-framework/failure-essence.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,392 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 5.1 $0.00079 $0.01392
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00696
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00139

Measured 6d ago against content hash 9fc01a9506df, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

failure-essence 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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/failure-essence/SKILL.md · 146 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 146 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Strategic Failure Patterns (Essence of Failure)

When to Apply

  • Creating or reviewing Strategy Kernels
  • When Goals have multiple competing objectives
  • When strategy language is vague or ambiguous
  • When a project should potentially be stopped
  • When assumptions underlying strategy need validation

Core Framework

1. Dual-Objective Trap Detection

When a Goal or Driver has two stated objectives, run a conflict stress test:

Goal: "Acquire 100 enterprise customers AND maintain 90% gross margin"

Conflict Stress Test:
  "Under what resource/timing constraints do these conflict?"
  -> Enterprise sales requires high-touch (high CAC)
  -> 90% margin limits sales investment
  -> Below $50K deal size, these are mutually exclusive

  "DUAL-OBJECTIVE CONFLICT detected. Under resource constraints,
   you cannot maximize both. Which is PRIMARY?"
  -> User designates primary; other becomes subordinate with floor.

Applied to: Goal creation, Driver creation, Strategy Kernel formulation. Any time two objectives appear in the same scope.

Resolution: One objective is PRIMARY (maximized). The other becomes SUBORDINATE with a minimum acceptable floor (not zero, just not maximized).

2. Strategic Ambiguity Detection

When Strategy Kernel or User Rules contain terms that could be interpreted divergently, test for operationalizability:

Guiding Policy: "Focus on high-value customers"

Ambiguity Test:
  "Could two people read 'high-value' and derive opposite actions?"
  Interpretation A: "Enterprise, $100K+ deals"
  Interpretation B: "High-NPS users who generate referrals"
  -> DIVERGENT INTERPRETATION detected.

  "Define 'high-value' operationally:
   - What metric defines it?
   - What threshold?
   - What would PROVE this strategy is working?
   - What would PROVE it is failing?"

Applied to: Guiding Policy terms, Driver titles, Action descriptions. Any abstract concept that drives resource allocation.

The test: Can two reasonable people read this and derive opposite actions? If yes, the term is dangerously ambiguous.

Read the full file on GitHub · 146 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. 6d ago First seen · 146 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 9fc01a9506df

Subscribe to this mod's changes

failure-essence is a skill published in the GitHub repository VoxTechnologies/anty-framework (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,392 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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