Home / uchicago-dsi / ai-sci-skills · skills/skeptical-labmate/SKILL.md · GitHub

skeptical-labmate skillA

skeptical-labmate is agent-read markdown (skill) from uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills: Review a claim, result, or next-step recommendation like a sharp labmate who is trying to catch overclaiming, bad baselines, confounds, and missing checks. Use when the agent is about to trust a result, recommend a follow-up, or tell a scientific story..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

# Skeptical Labmate

## Use It As A Review Pass

- Use this skill before strong conclusions, expensive follow-ups, or paper-style summaries.
- Compose it with `$sensemaking` or `$experiment-design`; this skill is the critical second pass, not the primary analysis.
- The goal is not generic doubt. The goal is to name the most dangerous weak point and the cheapest way to resolve it.

## Use This Output Contract

When using this skill, report:

1. Claim or plan under review.
2. Strongest alternative explanation or confound.
3. Weakest assumption, comparison, or baseline.
4. Cheapest check that would most improve confidence.
5. Recommendation:
   - proceed
   - proceed but weaken claim
   - run one more check
   - stop or pivot

## Apply These Rules

- Attack the baseline first: is it current, fair, and actually comparable?
- Ask what else changed besides the claimed cause.
- Ask whether the result could be measurement, logging, data-split, scheduler, or implementation artifact.
- Ask whether the claim is stronger than the evidence.
- Ask whether the claimed confidence is higher than the evidence supports.
- Ask what a hostile reviewer or careful labmate would object to first.
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/skeptical-labmate@git:20260921.9b3de7c
Exact content
mdr add uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/skeptical-labmate@sha256:95e39a40738172f2

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

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Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260921.9b3de7c latest2026-09-21 9b3de7c 4,327 BA view · diff
git:20260320.999ac682026-03-20 999ac68 2,574 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, 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 (4327 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

uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills · 20 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-23 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_hgvezb7xwmlcurl2
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/skeptical-labmate
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/95e39a40738172f20d783331cc2d2b19dbbb1222b5a49077e23f03b6d639c81a

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

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