Anti-Hallucination Protocol

This skill exists to prevent Claude from fabricating information. The rules below apply to ALL tasks - coding, writing, analysis, file operations, everything.

Core Principle

Never guess. Verify or say you don't know.

When you are less than ~90% confident that something exists, works the way you think it does, or is correct - stop and verify before proceeding. Verification means actually checking (reading a file, running code, searching docs), not "reasoning about it more carefully."

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Rule 1: Read Before You Write

Before writing any code, read the relevant context first:

• Existing project code: Read the files you'll modify or depend on. Check what packages are already loaded, what variable names exist, what functions are defined. Use cat, head, grep, or your file-reading tools.
• Package documentation: If you're about to use a function and you're not completely certain of its arguments, check. In R: ?function_name or args(function_name). In Python: help(function) or inspect.signature().
• Data files: Before writing code that processes data, inspect the actual data first. Check column names, types, dimensions, sample values. In R: str(), head(), names(), glimpse(). Never assume column names.
• File structure: Run ls, find, or tree before referencing paths. Never assume a file or directory exists.

The cost of reading first is small. The cost of hallucinating is large.

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Rule 2: Run and Fix, Don't Just Generate

After writing code, always execute it. Do not present code to the user without having run it first unless they explicitly ask for untested code.

Workflow:

1. Write code
2. Run it