think

A selector for structured thinking methods used to handle difficult decisions, investigations, and problems with several possible approaches. It can choose or directly invoke strategies such as branching options or repeated debugging cycles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when comparing options, balancing competing goals, checking a high-stakes conclusion, stepping back to find principles, or investigating a bug.
Why use it?
It helps an agent choose a suitable reasoning process instead of approaching every complex problem the same way.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/aaronsb/claude-code-config/think
Any agent
npx skills add aaronsb/claude-code-config --skill think
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aaronsb/claude-code-config

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 518 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 $0.00031 $0.00518
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00259
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00104
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00052

Measured 2d ago against content hash eb5ee82c10e2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

think 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.

skills/think/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Think Strategies

Explicit invocation of the structured thinking escalation. Use /think when you want to force an external reasoning strategy — the metacognitive check in the think way normally handles this autonomously.

Usage

/think                    # Show available strategies and select one
/think <strategy>         # Invoke a specific strategy directly

Available Strategies

Problem Shape Skill When to Use
Multiple viable approaches /think-tree "What are the options?" — branch, evaluate, prune
Three competing objectives /think-trilemma "We can't have all three" — satisfice
High-stakes decision /think-consistency "Are we sure?" — independent paths, consensus
Stuck / need principles /think-stepback "Why does this work?" — abstract, then apply
Investigation / debugging /think-react "Figure out why" — reason-act-observe cycle

When to Use /think Explicitly

  • You want to force external reasoning even if the agent's metacognitive check would have stayed internal
  • You want to choose a specific strategy rather than letting the agent select
  • You want to see the reasoning — external strategies surface each step

The think way's escalation gradient (internal → external → collaborative) handles most cases automatically. /think is the manual override.

Session Lifecycle

Think sessions have a lifecycle: start → work stages → complete (or abandon).

Before starting a new session:

# Check for active think session
cat /tmp/.claude-think-session 2>/dev/null
  • If a session is active, ask the user: finish it or abandon it first
  • Do NOT start a new think session while one is active

Abandoning a session (user says "never mind", "skip it", changes topic):

rm -f /tmp/.claude-think-session /tmp/.claude-way-meta-think-*"${CLAUDE_SESSION_ID:+-$CLAUDE_SESSION_ID}" 2>/dev/null

After completion or abandonment, the think way can fire again for new problems.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 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 · 57 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A eb5ee82c10e2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

think is a skill published in the GitHub repository aaronsb/claude-code-config (18 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 518 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 2026-08-30.