Build a throwaway spike solution to answer one design or technical question before committing to an approach. Use when the user wants to sanity-check whether a state model, logic, or UI direction feels right, is unsure an approach will work, or wants to explore options before writing production code.
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Prototype
A spike solution (Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham's term from Extreme Programming) is a quick, throwaway program written to answer **one specific technical question**, ignoring every other concern. The code is not the deliverable; the answer is. Most spikes aren't good enough to keep, and that's by design: keeping one is a sign it wasn't actually a spike.
## Phase 1: Name the question
Before writing anything, state the single question this spike exists to answer; "does this state machine handle the cancel-mid-submit case correctly?", "can this API return the shape we need without an extra round-trip?", "what should this settings panel look like?" A spike with more than one question attached is really two spikes; split it.
Identify which kind of question it is, since it decides the artifact:
- **"Does this logic / state model hold up?"** → build a single shareable file (or minimal script) that drives the logic through the cases that are hard to reason about on paper, printing the resulting state after each step so the answer is visible, not inferred.
…
The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260809.2a45dbb, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
A 17 of 17 checks passed. Fixed automatic checks with no AI involved, so the same checks give the same answer every run.
pass: Frontmatter block present
pass: Frontmatter declares a name
pass: Frontmatter declares a description
pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (4952 bytes)
pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
pass: No credential-shaped string
pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
pass: No text hidden with inline styles
pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
pass: No link to a raw IP address
pass: No script tag
Source
GitHub
aethrox/doctrine · 19 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-11 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_gxkbgbz3pe6kjaxj
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=aethrox/doctrine/prototype
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/09aa52a37e24b39ebd9a7277a16aa325916ead8c29c2c1ed198c5e0eef9cc25f
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