cobra
A Claude Code skill that asks one question before you adopt any measure: what is the cheapest way to satisfy this without achieving the goal?
Named for the cobra effect — a bounty on dead snakes that produced snake farms. A measure rewards what it counts, not what you meant. “Get the suite green” is satisfied most cheaply by deleting the failing test.
The skill fires when you define a test, benchmark, coverage target, SLO, quota, or an agent success condition, and asks three things: what gaming is cheapest, when the consequence arrives relative to the reward, and whether a hard-to-fake canary exists.
- +26.7pp
- Content delta
- 83%
- Trigger recall
- 92%
- Silence on negatives
3 signal tasks, n=10 per arm; rests on one
15/18, n=3 per prompt
36/39
- Claude Code Skill
- Evaluation
- Systems Thinking
- Markdown