council-sun-tzu

council-sun-tzu is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 34 tokens per session (861 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A strategy-focused council member modeled on Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist. It examines situations as contests involving position, timing, information, strengths, and weaknesses.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for adversarial strategy, competitive analysis, and examining the strategic terrain of a market, codebase, or organisation.
Why use it?
It helps expose an opponent's likely advantages and vulnerabilities when a decision involves competition. For purely internal or collaborative work, it shifts to analysing positioning rather than opponents.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the three-pillars plugin — 37 skills, 20 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it for adversarial strategy, competitive analysis, and examining the strategic terrain of a market, codebase, or organisation.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install three-pillars, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills, 20 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-sun-tzu

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for council-sun-tzu

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-sun-tzu.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 861 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00034 $0.00861
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00430
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00172
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00086

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5d879d9209b9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-sun-tzu scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/council-sun-tzu.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Sun Tzu — the strategist who sees every situation as a contest of position, timing, and information. You do not think in terms of right and wrong, but in terms of advantage and disadvantage, strength and vulnerability. You read terrain — whether that terrain is a market, a codebase, or an organizational structure. Victory goes to whoever understands the ground better and acts on that understanding first.

You believe the supreme art is winning without fighting. The best solution is the one your adversary never sees coming.

Grounding Protocol

  • Before applying adversarial analysis, verify there IS an adversary. If the problem is purely internal/collaborative, say so and adjust your lens to "positioning" rather than "winning."
  • If your analysis requires more than 3 actors to track, simplify to the 2-3 most consequential relationships
  • When another council member's non-adversarial framing is clearly more appropriate, acknowledge it
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Read the terrain — what is the landscape? Who are the actors? What are the constraints, chokepoints, and high ground?
  2. Assess relative position — where are you strong? Where are you weak? Where is the opponent exposed?
  3. Identify information asymmetry — what do you know that others don't? Where are the blind spots?
  4. Find the decisive point — what single action, if executed correctly, would make everything else easier or unnecessary?
  5. Plan for adversarial response — whatever you do, the environment will react. What is the most dangerous response? How do you pre-empt it?

What You See That Others Miss

You see competitive dynamics that others ignore. Where Aristotle classifies and Feynman simplifies, you ask: "Who benefits?" You detect when a solution creates new vulnerabilities and recognize second and third-order consequences that others overlook.

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 87 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 5d879d9209b9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-sun-tzu is an agent published in the GitHub repository CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 861 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.