ask-constraints

ask-constraints is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine. It costs 39 tokens per session (161 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A research-planning dialogue step for recording hard boundaries such as target venues, preferred methods, excluded topics, team requirements, and ethical or legal limits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define constraints for academic or other research projects before selecting a direction or method.
Why use it?
It keeps research plans aligned with requirements that cannot be ignored or changed later.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it to define constraints for academic or other research projects before selecting a direction or method.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints
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.

Any agent
npx skills add yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine --skill ask-constraints
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 ask-constraints

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for ask-constraints

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine/ask-constraints.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 161 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to low

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • low Excessive Agency · line 4
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
  • low Excessive Agency · line 27
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00039 $0.00161
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00081
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00032
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00016

Measured 7d ago against content hash f6b0a0b9a48d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ask-constraints 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 7d 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/ask-constraints/SKILL.md · 32 lines

What it actually says

Ask Constraints

Identify non-negotiable constraints.

Execution

Dialogue — inline, no subagent.

What to Ask About (one at a time)

  • Target venue/journal (if any)
  • Methodology preferences (empirical? theoretical? both?)
  • Areas to explicitly avoid
  • Advisor/team hard requirements
  • Ethical/legal constraints

Key Behavior

Not limited to ML/AI. Works for any research domain. Some users have no constraints — that's a valid answer.

Output

Constraints section of ActorProfile.

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. 7d ago First seen · 32 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A f6b0a0b9a48d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ask-constraints is a skill published in the GitHub repository yogsoth-ai/de-anthropocentric-research-engine (456 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 161 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

Deep Research

Produce a deep, structured research report on a topic: decompose into key dimensions, analyze each with evidence and reasoning, synthesize cross-cutting insights, and surface open questions. Use for deep research, analysis, and literature/landscape reviews.

AgentEra/Agently · 53 tokens

literature-review-tools

Recommend AND run open-source AI tools, agents, Claude Code / Codex skills, and MCP servers for any stage of a literature review — searching, reading, extracting, synthesizing, screening, citation-checking, and paper writing. Use when the user asks "what tool should I use to..." OR "install/run/use to ..." for…

brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools · 288 tokens

papers-reading-skill

Evidence-grounded AI research workflow for turning supplied economics, finance, management, and social-science papers or structured records into versioned PaperReading artifacts. Use when Codex must ingest text, Markdown, or a text-based PDF; separate source-grounded claims from researcher analysis; bind findings to…

AOROM/paperreading · 115 tokens

paper-fulltext-harvest

Batch download academic paper full-text (PDF/XML) from a list of DOIs. Handles 25 DOI prefixes across 19 publisher families via three layered routes: (1) publisher TDM APIs requiring institutional subscription (Elsevier ScienceDirect, Wiley Online, Springer Nature), (2) Open Access sources (Crossref, Unpaywall…

jxtse/scientific-research-skills · 276 tokens

academic-figure-generation

Generates publication-quality academic figures (framework diagrams, pipeline illustrations, system architectures, method overviews) from a paper's method text and a target caption, using a local PaperBanana multi-agent pipeline (Retriever → Planner → Stylist → Visualizer → Critic).

jxtse/scientific-research-skills · 59 tokens

paper-reading

Reads and analyzes academic papers (arXiv preprints, conference / journal PDFs, Zotero items) at three configurable depths: quick skim (2 min), standard read (10 min), or deep analysis (30 min). Produces structured digests covering problem, method, key innovation, results, limitations, reproducibility, hidden…

jxtse/scientific-research-skills · 154 tokens