Find, build, evaluate, and improve systems with decision models.
Augustus equips agents to find useful placements, build decision-driven systems, create evaluations, and hill-climb them against real outcomes. Reach for it when a step could be code, an LLM call, a classifier or ranker, or a person; when a confidence score needs a threshold, abstention, or a human fallback; or when a prompt or program needs an eval before you optimize it. It draws on decision theory, value of information, multi-criteria analysis, signal detection, search/control, and formal-methods boundaries across software, business, organizations, research, and everyday decisions.
TypeSafe Jev (Choice, Score, Noul) is the default hosted exemplar. The skill also covers classical classifiers, encoders, open decision heads, constrained readouts, rankers, and vision scorers. Choose the family by the task, then test it against the baseline. Sometimes the best result is a formula, a checklist, or no new model.
The working model is:
evidence → bounded judgment → explicit policy → checked action → observed outcome
Augustus is independent of TypeSafe. The official TypeSafe skill and current provider docs own API contracts; Augustus supplies composition, implementation, evaluation, and improvement methods. Named for Augustus De Morgan, mentor of William Stanley Jevons.
Watch the 2:38 film: Jevons' logic piano, De Morgan's boundary, and how Augustus places and tests a bounded judgment.
After installation, ask your agent:
Use Augustus to audit our refund-email workflow. Find the smallest useful classifier insertion, keep eligibility and payments in code, and propose an evaluation that could reject the change.
Use Augustus to compare ways our library could choose three programs under a fixed budget. Make the values, evidence gaps, and tradeoffs explicit.
Use Augustus to review this confidence threshold. Explain what the score means, when to abstain, and what we should measure on held-out cases.
Use Augustus to build a decision-model router and its evaluation harness. Keep our incumbent runnable, test complete episode outcomes, and set up a bounded improvement loop with untouched confirmation data and rollback.
Advice produces a concise design card and falsifier. Build requests produce working adapters, policy and evals; improvement requests produce a bounded incumbent–challenger loop. The agent reads only relevant references. Source popularity and proxy-score gains do not establish improvement.
| Problem | Placement | Evaluate |
|---|---|---|
| Expensive generated-JSON email routing | Bounded intent classifier before existing handlers | Action errors, review coverage, total cost |
| Search results need ordering | Retrieve candidates, then rank relevance | Recall, nDCG, final task success |
| Many plausible projects under a budget | Explicit utility/MCDA with exact constraints | Sensitivity, feasibility, stakeholder outcomes |
| Agent claims it is finished | Judge evidence gaps; verify artifacts and effects | False completion and recovery on real tasks |
| Need a decision under uncertainty | Compare act, defer, and gather-more-evidence | Expected loss and value of information |
| Model appears to approve a risky action | Treat judgment as evidence inside host policy | Unauthorized effects, failure paths, drift |
A typed response is not proof of truth. Ranking scores, probability, confidence, calibration, and action success have different meanings. See the working skill.
Install the published release, 0.7.2:
# Claude Code
claude plugin marketplace add 24601/Augustus@v0.7.2
claude plugin install augustus@augustus
# Codex, Cursor, and other Skills CLI agents
npx skills add https://github.com/24601/Augustus/tree/v0.7.2/.agents/skills/augustusTo follow the default branch, which may contain unreleased -dev work, use
claude plugin marketplace add 24601/Augustus or
npx skills add 24601/Augustus --skill augustus. A pinned install stays on
its tag. To move a Claude Code install to another tag, run
claude plugin marketplace remove augustus, then add and install again.
For a manual install, copy .agents/skills/augustus/ with its references and
scripts; Codex reads user skills from ~/.agents/skills/.
The skill needs no API key to provide design guidance. Calling Jev or another hosted provider is a separate, optional integration with its own credentials and costs. Review installed instructions before granting any agent access.
In Claude Code, invoke /augustus (a plugin install also answers to
/augustus:augustus); in Codex, use $augustus. With many skills installed,
a host may shorten or drop skill descriptions, so name the skill explicitly if
it is never chosen. If it is not visible, reload your agent's skills/plugins.
Check the installed version with claude plugin details augustus@augustus or
metadata.version in the installed SKILL.md. See
worked examples for the kind
of result to expect. Avoid installing the same skill by multiple methods in
one agent.
- Skill and reference index: runtime guidance.
- Research archive: primary sources, historical claims, revisits, and the current decision-model review.
- Contributing: content boundaries, tests, behavioral review.
- Changelog: product changes, separate from research observations.
- Website: examples and ecosystem orientation.
- Feedback: installation problems, mistaken activation, and sanitized real-world failures.
For local development, install requirements-dev.txt and run make check.
The offline helpers evaluate labeled binary predictions and paired workflow
outcomes; neither calls a model. The
composition calculus
and build/improvement workflow
connect methods to implementation and evidence. Tests and structural lint do
not establish model quality or deployment benefit.
Published release: 0.7.2. See the
release notes for changes and migration details.
The default branch is now 0.8.0-dev: unreleased work toward a second skill,
augustus-train. Install from the v0.7.2 tag when you need the published
revision.
Historical TypeSafe skill provenance: v0.5.7 (65a39f3), rechecked on
2026-09-23 as that repository's latest tag and HEAD. Read live provider docs
before writing integration code; that pin is not a current API guarantee.
MIT. See LICENSE. Security reports: SECURITY.md. Contributions: CONTRIBUTING.md.
