experimental-design

A guide for planning experiments and studies before collecting data, including how to assign subjects or samples to groups and arrange treatments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose an experimental layout, randomize assignments, group similar units into blocks, repeat treatments properly, and plan studies with multiple factors.
Why use it?
It helps prevent flawed comparisons that cannot answer the intended question, such as mixing several causes together or treating repeated measurements as independent evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/xintaofei/codeg/experimental-design
Any agent
npx skills add xintaofei/codeg --skill experimental-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xintaofei/codeg

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 204 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,989 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00204 $0.02989
Opus 5 $0.00102 $0.01494
Sonnet 5 $0.00041 $0.00598
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00299

Measured 2d ago against content hash 14b3f343c247, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

experimental-design 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/doe_designs.py, scripts/randomization.py), 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.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to experimental-design — 6 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

src-tauri/science/skills/experimental-design/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Experimental Design

Overview

The design of a study — how units are assigned to conditions, what is held constant, what is varied, and in what structure — determines what questions the data can answer. No analysis can rescue a confounded or pseudoreplicated design after the fact. This skill is about the decisions made before data collection: picking a design that isolates the effect of interest, randomizing to license causal claims, blocking to remove known nuisance variation, and structuring multi-factor experiments so effects are estimable rather than tangled together.

The three ideas behind almost every good design (Fisher's principles):

  • Randomization — assign treatments at random so that confounders, known and unknown, are balanced in expectation. This is what turns a comparison into a causal claim.
  • Replication — independent repetition at the right level, so you can estimate variability and your effects aren't artifacts of a single unit. The most common fatal error is pseudoreplication: counting repeated measurements on the same unit as independent replicates.
  • Blocking / local control — group similar units (by batch, day, site, litter) and randomize within blocks, removing that nuisance variation from the error term instead of letting it inflate noise.

This skill helps you choose among design types, generate the actual randomization or DOE layout (with reproducible scripts), and avoid the structural mistakes that make data uninterpretable.

When to Use This Skill

  • Planning any comparative experiment or trial and deciding how to assign units
  • Randomizing subjects/samples to arms (simple, blocked, stratified, or cluster)
  • Removing nuisance variation by blocking or stratification
  • Designing multi-factor experiments: full or fractional factorial, screening designs
  • Optimizing a response over continuous factors (response-surface designs)
  • Within-subject / repeated-measures, crossover, split-plot, or Latin-square designs
  • Cluster- or group-randomized designs (sites, clinics, classrooms, litters)
  • Deciding the number and level of replicates and avoiding pseudoreplication
  • Sequential, group-sequential, or adaptive designs with interim analyses
  • Laying out plates/batches and randomizing run order to defeat drift

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 2d ago First seen · 233 lines · 204 tokens per session scan A 14b3f343c247

Subscribe to this mod's changes

experimental-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository xintaofei/codeg (3,091 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 204 tokens to every session and 2,989 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to experimental-design, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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