ai-agents-empirical-probe-toolkit

# AI Agents Empirical Probe Toolkit <!-- vendor-portability: contributor-facing knowledge pack for the rjmurillo/ai-agents repo itself; intentionally references upstream paths (.agents/, .claude/, scripts/, build/) because its audience is repo contributors, not plugin consumers (issue #2050) --> This skill is the method library for replacing assumption with measurement. Every recipe exists because an assumption shipped here and became an incident. The house rule, from the #2290 payload-format incident: the cost of a probe is 15 minutes; the cost of assumption is a P0 (`.serena/memories/copilot-hooks-observations.md`). Two terms used throughout: - **Probe**: a minimal disposable artifact (a hook that dumps its environment, a script that captures stdin) run against the real pinned tool to observe what the tool actually does, instead of what its docs say. - **Negative control**: a deliberately broken input run through the same harness as the passing case, proving the test or probe CAN fail. A check that cannot fail proves nothing. ## Triggers - `probe the runtime contract` - `calibrate this guard` - `prove it empirically` - `add a negative control` - `docs versus reality audit` ## Recipe Selector | Situation | Recipe | Related skill | |-----------|--------|---------------| | You are about to rely on undocumented tool behavior (cwd, env vars, stdin format) | 1. Runtime-contract probe | `agent-harness-reference` for settled contracts | | You are shipping a detector, guard, ...