SystemsThinking

SystemsThinking is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from danielmiessler/LifeOS. It costs 90 tokens per session (2,435 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured way to study complex systems by mapping feedback, hidden causes, recurring patterns, and points where a small change may have a large effect.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine feedback loops, trace problems from symptoms to underlying structures, compare system patterns, and map related ideas.
Why use it?
It helps explain why a problem keeps returning instead of treating only its visible symptoms.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 · 18,885 stars · on GitHub

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/systemsthinking
Any agent
npx skills add danielmiessler/LifeOS --skill systemsthinking
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 SystemsThinking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/systemsthinking.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/systemsthinking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/systemsthinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/systemsthinking.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,435 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00090 $0.02435
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01218
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00487
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00244

Measured yesterday against content hash 791127428046, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

SystemsThinking scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 yesterday.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
LifeOS/install/skills/SystemsThinking/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 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/SystemsThinking/

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.

MANDATORY: Voice Notification (REQUIRED BEFORE ANY ACTION)

You MUST send this notification BEFORE doing anything else when this skill is invoked.

  1. Send voice notification:

    curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"message": "Running the WORKFLOWNAME workflow in the SystemsThinking skill to ACTION"}' \
      > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    
  2. Output text notification:

    Running the **WorkflowName** workflow in the **SystemsThinking** skill to ACTION...
    

This is not optional. Execute this curl command immediately upon skill invocation.


SystemsThinking Skill

What It Does

Analyzes complex systems to reveal why the same problem keeps coming back and where a small change produces a large result. Five workflows: Iceberg (walk symptom down to structure), CausalLoop (map feedback loops), FindArchetype (match a known pattern and apply its fix), FindLeverage (Meadows' 12 leverage points), ConceptMap (Novak entity-relationship). Grounded in Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Jay Forrester, Russell Ackoff, and the Santa Fe Institute tradition.

The Problem

Most attempts to fix a recurring problem operate at the event layer — patch the bug, retry the request, add another check — and the problem comes back, because the real cause lives 3-4 layers below in the structure that generates the events. People also can't see second-order effects: a "fix" ships and creates a new problem, or makes the original worse. Without a way to see the structure, you treat symptoms forever and the obvious lever is almost never where the symptom shows up.

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files 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. yesterday First seen · 175 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 791127428046

Subscribe to this mod's changes

SystemsThinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository danielmiessler/LifeOS (18,885 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 2,435 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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