critical-thinking AGENTS.md

A set of instructions for an agent skill that helps coding agents reason using probabilities, common starting rates, and evidence that could prove an idea wrong.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when working on the critical-thinking project, its skill files, evaluation tools, documentation, or versioned evaluation materials.
Why use it?
It helps reduce conclusions based only on guesses or overly confident assumptions. It also documents how to install the skill and run its evaluation process.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

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 instructions/johna2an/critical-thinking/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Johna2an/critical-thinking

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 731 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 731 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
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 $0.00731 $0.00731
Opus 5 $0.00365 $0.00365
Sonnet 5 $0.00146 $0.00146
Haiku 4.5 $0.00073 $0.00073

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9f342d8918a5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

critical-thinking AGENTS.md 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.

AGENTS.md · 40 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 40 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md

critical-thinking is an open-source Agent Skill for Claude Code and Claude-based agents that makes Claude reason with explicit probabilities, base rates, and falsifiers: in blind evaluations it ranked first in 18 of 18 judge passes against baseline Claude and GPT-5.5.

This file briefs coding agents working inside this repository. The skill itself is in skill/; everything else is evidence and tooling around it.

Repo map

Path What it is
skill/SKILL.md The operating manual. The only file guaranteed to be in context when the skill fires.
skill/references/ 9 on-demand reference libraries + books/ with 51 per-book teaching files.
versions/v1/ Frozen v1 (21 books). Exists so v1-vs-v2 evals stay reproducible. Do not edit.
evals/harness/ Python/bash eval pipeline. Paths resolve relative to the scripts; no setup needed.
evals/round-*/ Raw eval artifacts: responses, judge JSON, rotation maps, _verdicts.json, _report.html.
docs/ EVALS (results + limitations), HYPOTHESES (what broke), PROCESS (how it was built), ROADMAP.

Install (for a user asking "should I install this?")

cp -r skill ~/.claude/skills/critical-thinking

No build, no dependencies, no API keys. MIT license. The skill self-triggers on reasoning-shaped requests; evidence for whether it helps is in docs/EVALS.md, including the limitations (judges were Claude agents, n=1 per cell).

Working in this repo

  • Claims about the skill ride on evals. A change to skill/ needs a before/after run of the relevant eval round, or a clear statement that it is non-behavioral. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
  • Never commit book text. Reference files are original prose restating methods. corpus/, *.epub, *.mobi are gitignored on purpose.
  • Recompute, do not trust. _verdicts.json files are derived; the ground truth is judges/*.json + rotation_map.json. Aggregators are deterministic: python evals/harness/aggregate_ct.py (round 1), aggregate_creative.py (round 2), aggregate_4way.py (round 3).
  • Prose style for docs: plain declarative sentences. No em dashes, no rhetorical negation hinges ("not X, but Y"). Judge quotes are data and stay verbatim.

Read the full file on GitHub · 40 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 · 40 lines · 731 tokens per session scan A 9f342d8918a5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

critical-thinking AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository Johna2an/critical-thinking (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 731 tokens to every session, about $0.0037 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.

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