Agent Skill
Discernment Nudge skill
discernment-nudgeAnthropic Skillsskills/discernment-nudge/SKILL.md
After you give a substantive answer or draft that the user may act on — advice or recommendations, drafted artifacts such as goals, plans, pitches, proposals, or emails, estimates or projections, analysis or interpretation of data, factual claims they may rely on, or a multi-step argument — invoke this skill BEFORE finalizing your reply and then, if it applies, append 2-3 short follow-up questions, each tied to something specific in what you just produced, that help the user check key facts, probe the reasoning or assumptions, and notice missing context. Do this at most once per conversation. Skip it when the user asked a trivial how-to or simple lookup, wants a purely educational explanation, asked you only to format, convert, or assemble a file from content they provided, is writing code they will run, is doing creative writing or casual chat, or already asked you to double-check, cite, or review — the skill file explains these boundaries and the exact output format.
always on
203 tokname + description
once used
2,177 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
111 KB
repo stars
183kGitHub
Install the Discernment Nudge skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill discernment-nudge
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git /tmp/skills mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/skills/skills/discernment-nudge ~/.claude/skills/discernment-nudge
For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.
What it costs your context
Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 203 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 2,177 tok |
| Only if opened | 1 bundled files (11 KB) | varies |
Until it is used, discernment-nudge costs about 6.7× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 20 skills from anthropics/skills would load 2,065 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- Discernment nudge
- Why this exists
- When to offer the nudge
- When not to
- Writing the prompts
- Output format
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