impact-check

impact-check is a skill for Claude Code from zjunlp/Mechanist. It costs 44 tokens per session (1,027 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research assessment tool for judging whether a proposed problem or behavior matters enough to study. It considers value to research, practical applications, society, and related fields.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess the importance and potential reach of a research idea before choosing experiments or preparing a study.
Why use it?
It helps you avoid committing time to an idea whose importance, audience, or possible impact is unclear.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the mechanist plugin — 54 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess the importance and potential reach of a research idea before choosing experiments or preparing a study.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zjunlp/mechanist/impact-check
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 zjunlp/Mechanist --skill impact-check
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zjunlp/Mechanist

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mechanist, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 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 impact-check

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/impact-check.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/impact-check)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/impact-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zjunlp/mechanist/impact-check.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,027 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
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 $0.00044 $0.01027
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00513
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00205
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00103

Measured 8d ago against content hash 3a68c8eeca5f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

impact-check 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 8d 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.

skills/impact-check/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Impact Check Skill

Check whether a proposed idea studies an important problem/behavior — one worth committing effort to: $ARGUMENTS

What Counts as Impact

An idea is high-impact to the extent it does ANY of the following:

  • solves an important problem;
  • is likely to be widely used or cited by follow-up research;
  • could change the direction of a research area;
  • helps real applications, industry, society, or cross-disciplinary research;
  • reveals an important phenomenon, even if the method is simple.

Constants

  • REVIEWER_BACKEND = llm-chat — External LLM reviewer via llm-chat MCP (model defers to LLM_MODEL env). Always ask the external reviewer for strict, high-rigor feedback.

Instructions

Given an idea / behavior description, systematically assess its importance:

Phase A: Extract the Impact-Bearing Claims

  1. Read the description and name the behavior/phenomenon or problem under study (not the method).
  2. Extract the elements that determine its importance:
    • What problem does it address, and who actually has that problem?
    • What downstream research or applications would build on it if the result holds?
    • What would change — in the field or in practice — if it is true?
    • What is the reach: one narrow setting, a whole research area, or real-world / cross-disciplinary use?
  3. State the single strongest one-line case for why it matters.

Phase B: Assess Impact Along the Dimensions

For EACH impact dimension below, judge how strongly the idea scores and gather supporting evidence (use WebSearch / WebFetch to check whether the problem is an open/active question, how much attention it gets, and where it would be used):

  1. Important problem — Is this a problem the field (or a real application) actually needs solved, or a niche curiosity?
  2. Uptake / citation — Would follow-up research likely build on, use, or cite this? Does it produce a reusable artifact (dataset, method, finding, diagnostic)?
  3. Direction-shifting — Could the result change how people think about or approach a research area?
  4. Real-world reach — Does it help applications, industry, society, or cross-disciplinary work?
  5. Phenomenon value — Even if the method is simple, does the result reveal an important phenomenon?

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. 8d ago First seen · 87 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 3a68c8eeca5f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

impact-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository zjunlp/Mechanist (72 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 1,027 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 2026-08-30.