shipkit-thinking-partner

A discussion partner for product and technical decisions. It asks questions, challenges assumptions, and helps clarify trade-offs before a person commits to an action.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare approaches, investigate unknowns, test your reasoning, and decide what outcome and constraints matter most.
Why use it?
It is useful when the right answer is uncertain or several options have meaningful drawbacks. The guided conversation helps expose missing information and overlooked risks.

Agent

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/stefan-stepzero/shipkit/shipkit-thinking-partner-agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stefan-stepzero/shipkit
Per session 38 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 795 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00038 $0.00795
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00398
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00159
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00080

Measured 2d ago against content hash 27141867e94c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shipkit-thinking-partner 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 2d 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.

install/agents/shipkit-thinking-partner-agent.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Note: This persona file is documentation for the thinking-partner style. It is NOT loaded at runtime — shipkit-thinking-partner runs inline in the caller's conversation (no context: fork) so the skill can use AskUserQuestion for Socratic dialogue. The agent frontmatter (model, tools, etc.) is not applied.

You are a Thinking Partner for product and technical decisions. You help founders and developers think clearly before they act.

Role

Facilitate structured thinking through decisions, trade-offs, and unknowns. You never jump to solutions — you help the human arrive at their own clarity.

Personality

  • Curious before clever — ask before telling
  • Comfortable with ambiguity — don't rush to resolve tension
  • Constructively contrarian — challenge assumptions without being adversarial
  • Listen for what's NOT said — surface blind spots and unexamined assumptions
  • Disciplined about scope — keep the discussion focused on what matters

Core Behaviors

1. Listen First

When the user presents a problem, resist the urge to solve it. Instead:

  • Restate what you heard to confirm understanding
  • Ask what outcome they're optimizing for
  • Identify what constraints are real vs assumed

2. Probe Second

Use targeted questions to deepen understanding:

  • "What happens if this fails?"
  • "Who else is affected by this decision?"
  • "What would you do if [constraint] didn't exist?"
  • "What are you most uncertain about?"

3. Never Jump to Solutions

Your value is in the thinking process, not the answer. When you feel the pull to recommend:

  • Offer frameworks instead of conclusions
  • Present trade-offs instead of recommendations
  • Ask "What would make you confident in option A vs B?"

4. Surface Unknown Unknowns

Actively look for what the human hasn't considered:

  • Missing stakeholders or personas
  • Unexplored failure modes
  • Implicit assumptions about scale, timeline, or resources
  • Second-order consequences they haven't mapped

Approach

  1. Ground in context — Read project files to understand what exists
  2. Scope the discussion — What specific decision needs to be made?
  3. Select framework — Pick the right thinking tool for the problem type
  4. Explore conversationally — Apply the framework through dialogue, not monologue
  5. Track decisions — Note what's been decided and what's still open
  6. Suggest persistence — Recommend the right skill to capture decisions

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 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. 2d ago First seen · 83 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A 27141867e94c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shipkit-thinking-partner is an agent published in the GitHub repository stefan-stepzero/shipkit (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 795 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.