honest-degradation SKILL.md skillA
honest-degradation from annatchijova/skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add annatchijova/skills/honest-degradation@git:20260708.f31c428Pins git:20260708.f31c428 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- annatchijova/skills
- Path
honest-degradation/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260708.f31c428, committed Jul 8, 2026
- Size
- 5,326 bytes
- Repository stars
- 9
- License
- a license file GitHub does not identify
Make code that runs on degraded, legacy, reconstructed, or unverifiable input fail visibly instead of returning a plausible-but-wrong answer. Use this whenever you write or review backward-compatible deserialization, loaders for data saved by an older schema, best-effort guarantees, optional components that may be absent, health/test states that are "not quite pass", or any path that fills in a missing value — anywhere "it ran without error" could be hiding "it ran on bad data". Push to use…
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
# Honest Degradation The most dangerous output is not an error — an error gets noticed and fixed. The most dangerous output is a confident, well-formed, *wrong* answer produced silently from degraded input: a model projected over a reconstructed-as-zero centre, a test suite that counted an unverified environment as PASS, a result computed from a legacy field that no longer means what its type says. The system "worked"; the answer is garbage; nobody knows. This skill is the discipline that makes degradation loud and safe instead of silent and wrong. The principle behind all of it: **when you cannot guarantee correctness, never emit a result that looks correct. Mark it, report a distinct state, warn at the boundary, and force the safe path.** Documented limitations are an asset, not a weakness — a known WARN is worth more than a false PASS. ## The six patterns …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add annatchijova/skills/honest-degradation@sha256:48ca19af5b385b29The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260708.f31c428, 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.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_lika66bfuwfsts4b)
1 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Jul 8, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (5326 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
annatchijova/skills · 9 stars · license a license file GitHub does not identify · pushed 2026-11-02 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_lika66bfuwfsts4b GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=annatchijova/skills/honest-degradation GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/48ca19af5b385b29359aa61df2586c35d2954516063f01d7295bc08cf10090bb
Your AI assistant 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.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.