What is make-nontrivial?

A framework for making a job application more distinctive than a simple CV summary. It produces a role reframe, a company-product analysis, evidence for each claim, and honest risks.

Use it to create a tailored motivation answer, testable product hypotheses, a proof map linked to the CV, and points a hiring manager may question.

It helps an application show how the candidate thinks about the employer's actual product and problem, not only match keywords.

How Zetetic-Dhruv/witness-mcp configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to Zetetic-Dhruv/witness-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Zetetic-Dhruv/witness-mcp/main/.claude/skills/make-nontrivial/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Zetetic-Dhruv/witness-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zetetic-dhruv/witness-mcp/make-nontrivial.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 493 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.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00089	$0.00493
Opus 5	$0.00044	$0.00246
Sonnet 5	$0.00018	$0.00099
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00049

Measured 11d ago against content hash d417e9eb3039, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

make-nontrivial 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 11d 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.

.claude/skills/make-nontrivial/SKILL.md · 28 lines

What it actually says

make-nontrivial

A trivial application restates the CV in the form's grammar — the axis an ATS reduces to keywords. A non-trivial one changes what the reader thinks they're hiring for. Produce four parts:

Reframe — the role's REAL problem, then the new axis where this candidate is the obvious hire (their differentiators from profile.json → positioning), not years/title/keywords.
Why-us — 90–130 words: one concrete observation about the company's product + their edge + one real proof point.
Teardown (the witness) — a short teardown of THE COMPANY'S product through the candidate's lens: where intended meaning may diverge from how users interpret it, one testable hypothesis, how they'd measure it. Hypotheses only — never invent facts about the company.
Proof map + risks — every claim maps to a real fact in profile.json (else mark needs_confirmation and ask — never fabricate). Then 1–2 honest lines on what a skeptic will doubt.

How

Pre-authored kits (if any) live in <folder>/nontrivial_kits.json and auto-attach in apply-to-job.
New company: python -m src.cli --data-dir <folder> kit --company "<Name>" --role "<Role>" --context "<what you know>" (needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY). Without a key, draft it yourself following the four parts.
Sanity-check any answer: python -m src.cli triviality --text "<answer>" --company "<Name>". If TRIVIAL, add a company-specific reframe + a real proof point.

Non-trivial ≠ inflated — the proof-map honesty gate keeps repositioning grounded. No clichés, no em dashes.

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.

11d ago First seen · 28 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A d417e9eb3039

Subscribe to this mod's changes

make-nontrivial is a skill published in the GitHub repository Zetetic-Dhruv/witness-mcp (0 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 493 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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witness-mcp: Skill for Claude Code