ponder

ponder is a command for coding agents from tslateman/duet. It costs 6 tokens per session (373 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that randomly selects one or more reflective questions from a fixed list.

In plain words
What is it for?
Starting personal or engineering reflection about decisions, systems, work habits, and growth.
Why use it?
It gives you a prompt for thinking when you do not have a specific question ready.

Command

Part of the duet plugin — 25 skills, 6 commands, 1 agent shipped together

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 commands/tslateman/duet/ponder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tslateman/duet

Or install duet, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 6 commands, 1 agent.

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 ponder

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/tslateman/duet/ponder.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/tslateman/duet/ponder)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/tslateman/duet/ponder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/tslateman/duet/ponder.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 6 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 373 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 $0.00006 $0.00373
Opus 5 $0.00003 $0.00187
Sonnet 5 $0.00001 $0.00075
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00037

Measured 3d ago against content hash 332f65863ef6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ponder 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 3d 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.

commands/ponder.md · 28 lines

What it actually says

Pick ${ARGUMENTS:-1} question(s) at random from this list and present them:

  • What would a 'Navigation Dead Reckoning' system look like for career decisions?
  • How do you architect for forgetting - designing systems that gracefully degrade memories they no longer need?
  • What's the engineering equivalent of muscle memory, and how do you deliberately train it?
  • What would a 'compiler for human intentions' look like?
  • What's the half-life of a decision, and how do you build with decay in mind?
  • What would 'emotional CI/CD' look like?
  • How do you measure growth through adversity without incentivizing unnecessary suffering?
  • What patterns in your codebase would embarrass you if they became visible?
  • How do you design for the engineer you'll be in 5 years, not the one you are today?
  • What's the 'tidal' pattern in your work - the thing that advances and retreats but never stops?
  • What would 'earthquake-ready' architecture look like for sudden market shifts?
  • How do you instrument for questions you don't yet know how to ask?
  • What's the simplest complex thing you've built, and the most complex simple thing?
  • How do you paint with constraints - making limitation a creative force?
  • What would controlled burns look like in software - deliberate destruction for ecosystem health?
  • If 'people arrive at beliefs based on what they find attractive' (Pascal), how do you make good architecture attractive?
  • What technical truths do you think you possess directly, and which might be mere familiarity?
  • How do you design systems that please as much as they convince?
  • What beliefs about your codebase exist not from proof but from attraction?
  • When you consider the infinite space of possible solutions, which silences alarm you?
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. 3d ago First seen · 28 lines · 6 tokens per session scan A 332f65863ef6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ponder is a command published in the GitHub repository tslateman/duet (1 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 6 tokens to every session and 373 once invoked, about $0.0000 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.