Agent skill · yonatangross
paired-probe
Refuses a verdict a check did not earn: runs it with the fault present and absent and blocks when both agree; catches zero-sample sweeps and swallowed errors. Use before reporting any status, audit or nothing-found result.
What it needs
About 2k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
paired-probe A check that prints the same thing whether or not the fault is present has measured nothing. It still returns an answer, that answer looks like evidence, and it gets acted on. This skill makes the blindness fail loudly instead. When to reach for it Before reporting any of these, because all of them are verdicts: "nothing found", "all clean", "no failures", "safe to delete" a sweep, audit, or status roll-up over N items a security or CI gate that just went green any check that passed when you expected it to fail And immediately whenever a result surprises you by passing. Surprise is the cheapest available signal that the instrument, not the world, is what changed. The three gates Gate Question Failure it catches --- --- --- Differential What does this print when the fault is ABSENT? A probe that answers identically either way Non-empty How many items did it actually examine? A sweep that measured zero and reported clean Exit-aware Did the probe itself run? A swallowed error printing success Could-not-observe is a third outcome, never folded into either verdict. Usage Exit codes: 0 discriminates or met the count, 1 BLIND, 2 usage, 3 could-not-observe. Why this exists Four probes from a single session, 2026-08-21, each confidently wrong and none failing loudly. Three were caught by other people rather than by the check: The probe What it asked Why it lied --- --- --- "is this branch pushed?" the local ref cache unfetched and never-pushed print identically "is the branch on origin?" the remote branch list a squash-merge DELETES the head branch, so landed work reads as lost "does this worktree hold unique work?" diff main HEAD symmetric, so a stale tree flags main against itself "any worktree at risk?" a loop over a blocked temp file the write failed, \ \ true swallowed it, the loop read zero items and printed "safe to prune" Every one dies at gate 1 or 2 in seconds. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills yonatangross/paired-probe--18dace