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 agentmods add skills/backnotprop/pstack/figure-it-outnpx skills add backnotprop/pstack --skill figure-it-outgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/backnotprop/pstackWhat 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 | $0.00080 | $0.01107 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00040 | $0.00553 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00221 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00111 |
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 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.
Copies of this mod
4 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- figure-it-out — 97% identical, 2 lines differ
- figure-it-out — 97% identical, 1 lines differ
- figure-it-out — 97% identical, 1 lines differ
- figure-it-out — 91% identical, 4 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 56 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. Bias toward more rigor. The cost of building the wrong thing dwarfs the cost of being careful.
Don't reinvent a playbook you already have. A focused single-unit task that matches Bug fix, Perf, Feature, Visual parity, Eval, or Multi-phase plan routes there. But a large or cross-cutting version of one (a migration across many call sites, an ambitious multi-part change), or work the user reviews after stepping away, belongs here even though a single-unit version would be a Feature. The rigor and the audit trail are the point.
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). "Done well" has to be checkable.
- Scope, quantified: rough units and effort, plus the blockers grounding surfaced. Raise them before spending hours, not after fifty doomed commits.
- 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 so option value stays high. 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) with diverse, isolated, opinionated candidates and a read-only judge on a different model family. 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 genuine seams, and give each worker its own worktree or branch (the separate-before-serializing-shared-state principle skill). Don't over-fan.
- 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.
- 2d 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 (181 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,107 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.
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