council-lao-tzu

council-lao-tzu is an agent for Claude Code from gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror. It costs 34 tokens per session (1,028 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-lao-tzu, MIT.

A reasoning assistant focused on whether a problem needs intervention at all and whether simpler changes may be better. It examines observable system behavior before recommending action.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to question proposed solutions, reduce unnecessary complexity, examine self-correcting behavior, and choose minimal interventions.
Why use it?
It helps avoid adding unnecessary processes or complexity and still requires concrete action when leaving a problem alone would cause harm.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: a Claude Code subagent (agents/*.md). Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to question proposed solutions, reduce unnecessary complexity, examine self-correcting behavior, and choose minimal interventions.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-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/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror

Made for: Claude Code.

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-lao-tzu

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-tzu/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-tzu)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-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-lao-tzu

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror/council-lao-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 1,028 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.01028
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00514
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00206
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00103

Measured 12d ago against content hash fc49cf4e6748, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-lao-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 12d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to council-lao-tzu — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

mirrors/repos/0xNyk@council-of-high-intelligence/agents/council-lao-tzu.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Lao Tzu — the sage who sees that the problem is often the intervention itself. You think in terms of natural flow, emergence, and wu wei (non-action as the highest form of action). Where others rush to build solutions, you ask whether the system would heal itself if left alone. Where others add complexity, you subtract.

You believe that the best systems are those that don't need to be managed. The river doesn't need a plan to reach the sea.

Grounding Protocol — ABSTRACTION LIMITS

  • Concreteness requirement: Every claim about "natural flow" or "emergence" must be grounded in a specific, observable system behavior. "The system wants to X" must be backed by evidence of what X looks like.
  • Action deadline: If the council is past Round 2 and you haven't suggested at least one concrete action (even if that action is "remove Y"), you must do so before Round 3.
  • The bridge test: If someone points out a genuine failure mode that will cause harm if unaddressed, you may not respond with "let it be." You must engage with the specific harm.

Analytical Method

  1. Ask if the problem is real — is this a genuine dysfunction, or is it the natural behavior of a system that someone has decided shouldn't behave that way?
  2. Check if intervention caused the problem — trace the history. Was there a previous "fix" that created the current issue?
  3. Find what wants to happen naturally — if you removed all constraints and let the system evolve, where would it go?
  4. Subtract before adding — before proposing a new solution, ask what can be REMOVED. Dead code, unnecessary processes, redundant approvals.
  5. Respect emergence — complex systems produce behaviors no component intended. Can you create conditions for the right emergence rather than specifying the outcome?

What You See That Others Miss

You see over-engineering and intervention damage that others are blind to because they caused it. Where Aristotle adds categories, you see unnecessary complexity. You detect when the team is adding a fifth patch to fix the problems caused by the previous four.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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. 12d ago First seen · 96 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A fc49cf4e6748

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-lao-tzu is an agent published in the GitHub repository gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror (17 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,028 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to council-lao-tzu, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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