pstack is a collection of plain Agent Skills and engineering principles that guide AI-assisted software development across coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Cursor, and OpenCode. It is for developers who want reusable practices for tasks including testing, technical writing, debugging, review, and coordinating agent work. The catalogue entries are the project's skills, agents, and plugin.
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.
npx skills add backnotprop/pstack --skill figure-it-outgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/backnotprop/pstackWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-out)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-out"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-out/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-out"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-out.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00063 | $0.00897 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00025 | $0.00359 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00179 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00090 |
Grade A, and why
figure-it-out 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 7d 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.
This is a copy
97% identical to figure-it-out — 3 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Figure it out
When the task matches no playbook, design one. The deliverable before any code is the workflow itself: a sequence of phases that scales rigor to the task, runs the scientific method, and leaves a decision trail a human can audit after stepping away.
Start
Open a todolist whose first item is to read the Principles section of the poteto-mode skill. Then add the phases below as todos.
Phase A: Frame
Ground first, then commit. Don't start the run until you can state:
- The definition of done as a falsifiable predicate (the prove-it-works principle skill).
- Scope, quantified: rough units and effort, plus the blockers grounding surfaced.
- The rigor level, biased high. One-way doors and high blast radius get more. Reversible low-stakes steps get less. Rigor is gates and artifacts, not "try harder".
Present the framing and tradeoffs before committing to a long run. Reversible work proceeds (the never-block-on-the-human principle skill), but a multi-hour run earns one checkpoint.
Phase B: Design the workflow
Decompose into atomic, independently-landable units. Sequence riskiest-unknown-first. Scaffold and verification come before features (the foundational-thinking principle skill).
- Build the verification harness before the work, with the baseline captured from the pre-change state, so the check reads as "old value vs new value".
- For one-way-door design decisions, run the architect skill (it runs arena). Skip it for mechanical work whose shape is already concrete. A second arena over a settled design is over-engineering (the laziness-protocol principle skill).
- Decide what fans out. Parallelize only across seams, and give each worker its own worktree or branch (the separate-before-serializing-shared-state principle skill). Don't over-fan. Pick each subagent's reasoning level and fast or standard speed for the job, per the Subagents section of the poteto-mode skill.
- Write the designed phase list down. That list is what the human reviews.
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.
- 7d ago Changed bdb23cdbd82a
- 10d ago Changed · -1 lines · -17 tokens per session d9574cc24929
- 18d ago Changed 0eb9485f0e7d
- 1mo ago Changed · -2 lines e041c64a39f1
- 1mo ago First seen · 56 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 548616d04909
figure-it-out is a skill published in the GitHub repository backnotprop/pstack (2,580 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 897 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to figure-it-out, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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