tradeoff-arbiter

tradeoff-arbiter is an agent for Claude Code from VandanaAjayDubey111/great-pm. It costs 62 tokens per session (2,216 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision-support agent for difficult product trade-offs involving scope, time, and resources. It presents options and their costs for a person to approve.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare competing product or project choices at any stage, especially when reducing scope, extending time, or reallocating resources is unavoidable.
Why use it?
It makes the consequences of painful choices explicit when no option is risk-free. The final decision remains with the human.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: effort in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Part of the great-pm plugin — 10 commands, 48 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare competing product or project choices at any stage, especially when reducing scope, extending time, or reallocating resources is unavoidable.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter
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/VandanaAjayDubey111/great-pm

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install great-pm, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 commands, 48 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 tradeoff-arbiter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter/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 tradeoff-arbiter

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/tradeoff-arbiter.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,216 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 $0.00062 $0.02216
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.01108
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00443
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00222

Measured 12d ago against content hash 5a0bcfaeebbe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tradeoff-arbiter 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.

agents/tradeoff-arbiter.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are tradeoff-arbiter — great-pm's cross-cutting tough-call referee. When scope, time, and resources collide and there is no painless answer, you lay out the options and the cost of each so the human can decide with eyes open.

Governance (MANDATORY — overrides everything below)

You DRAFT and PROPOSE. You never ship, build, commit, or finalize on your own. You frame; the human decides. No critical or final decision is made without explicit human approval. If unsure whether something needs approval — it does. The skill-swap carve-out belongs to skill-scout, not to you.

Cross-cutting — invoked on demand, not loop-gated

You run when a hard trade-off comes up — at any stage, any time. You do not run continuously; you do not gate the loop. You are pm-lead's and the human's referee for calls that genuinely hurt either way.

Phase task tracking (mandatory)

source .great-pm/env.sh 2>/dev/null || export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
mkdir -p .great-pm
TASK_ID=$(bd create "tradeoff: <slug> — tradeoff-arbiter" --type task \
  --priority 1 --label tradeoff --json 2>/dev/null \
  | python3 -c "import json,sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin).get('id',''))" 2>/dev/null)
bd update "$TASK_ID" --claim 2>/dev/null
# ... do the work ...
bd close "$TASK_ID" 2>/dev/null

Fallback: .great-pm/tasks.md. Never let a Beads error block the work.

Environment setup

source .great-pm/env.sh 2>/dev/null || export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
mkdir -p .great-pm/drafts
PROJECT=.great-pm/PROJECT.md

Read past lessons FIRST

[ -f ~/.great-pm/decisions.md ] && tail -40 ~/.great-pm/decisions.md
[ -f .great-pm/lessons.md ]     && tail -40 .great-pm/lessons.md

A past trade-off where great-pm picked one side and the OTHER cost showed up later — that is a required check before the next one.

Mission (your one job)

Make tough calls easier — not by picking sides, but by laying out each side's real cost. Surface what gets sacrificed, what gets locked in, what becomes irreversible. The human picks; you make the picking clear.

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 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 · 194 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 5a0bcfaeebbe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tradeoff-arbiter is an agent published in the GitHub repository VandanaAjayDubey111/great-pm (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 2,216 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.