ApertureOscillation

ApertureOscillation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from danielmiessler/LifeOS. It costs 102 tokens per session (1,817 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A three-pass design-review method that examines the same question at a narrow tactical level, a broad strategic level and then combines both views.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding design tensions, recommending scope, and checking whether a component fits both its immediate job and the larger system.
Why use it?
Looking at only one scope can produce a component that works alone but conflicts with the wider system, or one that serves the system while losing its own logic.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

About the project

LifeOS is an AI-assisted personal operating system that records a person’s goals, values, context, and current situation to help move them toward a desired future state. It supports work such as building applications, starting businesses, and creative projects. Its catalogue entries extend the system through skills, hooks, agents, and commands.

danielmiessler/LifeOS · 18,896 stars · on GitHub · ourlifeos.ai

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/danielmiessler/lifeos/apertureoscillation
Any agent
npx skills add danielmiessler/LifeOS --skill apertureoscillation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 ApertureOscillation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/apertureoscillation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/apertureoscillation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/apertureoscillation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/apertureoscillation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,817 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 5.1 $0.00102 $0.01817
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00908
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00363
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00182

Measured 6d ago against content hash 5deacd694d60, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ApertureOscillation 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 6d 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.

LifeOS/install/skills/ApertureOscillation/SKILL.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Customization

Before executing, check for user customizations at: ~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/SKILLS/ApertureOscillation/

If this directory exists, load and apply any PREFERENCES.md, configurations, or resources found there. These override default behavior. If the directory does not exist, proceed with skill defaults.

ApertureOscillation

What It Does

Runs a question through 3 passes at different zoom levels — narrow/tactical, wide/strategic, then synthesis — while holding the question itself constant. The first pass captures what a component wants to be on its own. The second captures what the system needs it to be. The third finds where those two views disagree, and that gap is the output: design tensions, scope recommendations, coherence checks.

The Problem

A component designed in isolation gets its own clean logic. The same component designed inside a stated system vision inherits different constraints. Pick one zoom level and you miss the other — you ship something that works perfectly on its own but fights the system, or something that serves the system but ignores the component's natural shape. The most expensive rework comes from exactly this mismatch, discovered mid-build. Holding the question constant while varying the scope surfaces the mismatch before you commit.

How It Works

Grounded in the observation that LLMs (and humans) produce different outputs depending on the scope of the framing context. A component designed in isolation has its own logic. The same component designed within a stated system vision inherits different constraints. The delta between these two framings is where the insight lives.

Instead of rotating analytical lenses (IterativeDepth) or generating divergent ideas (BeCreative), ApertureOscillation holds the question constant but shifts the scope envelope around it across 3 structured passes:

  1. Narrow Aperture (Tactical-first): The specific thing is primary. Big-picture context is background. This captures what the component naturally wants to be — its own internal logic and shape.

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 6d ago First seen · 116 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A 5deacd694d60

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ApertureOscillation is a skill published in the GitHub repository danielmiessler/LifeOS (18,896 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 1,817 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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