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

sensemaking skillA

sensemaking is agent-read markdown (skill) from uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills: Check whether findings make sense before trusting or reporting them by comparing to the nearest reference, asking what mechanism could explain them, and naming a falsifier. Use when the agent is interpreting results, summarizing progress, assessing regressions, or deciding whether an observation should change the plan..

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

# Sensemaking

## Use It As A Default Habit

- Compose this skill with domain skills instead of replacing them.
- Use it whenever you are about to trust, summarize, or act on a finding.
- Default question: does this result actually make sense, and if so, what should change because of it?

## Use This Output Contract

When using this skill, structure the reasoning as:

1. Observation: what happened.
2. Expected: what you thought would happen instead.
3. Nearest reference: the baseline, sibling case, prior run, known-good path, or control.
4. Best explanation: the most plausible mechanism right now.
5. Falsifier: one observation that would seriously weaken that explanation.
6. Decision impact: what changes, or why nothing changes.
7. Baseline disposition: whether the nearest valid baseline remains active or
   has been superseded, and by what evidence.
8. Falsification scope: the exact hypothesis or changed delta rejected, plus
   the parent method or unchanged components that remain live.

## Apply These Rules

- Separate observation from interpretation.
- Compare against the nearest useful reference, not an abstract ideal.
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/sensemaking@git:20260921.9b3de7c
Exact content
mdr add uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/sensemaking@sha256:fd261e7fb415ce23

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 6,271 BA view · diff
git:20260716.0e01ec72026-07-16 0e01ec7 3,950 BA view · diff
git:20260320.999ac682026-03-20 999ac68 3,578 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 (6271 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_k474xjcwwsskn7fk
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=uchicago-dsi/ai-sci-skills/sensemaking
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/fd261e7fb415ce23773cac1ebd2049d66585bd4828c461f27777710bb9a8e857

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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