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/danium/lateral-thinking/analogynpx skills add danium/lateral-thinking --skill analogygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinkingWhat 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 | $0.00131 | $0.01357 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00066 | $0.00678 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00271 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00136 |
Grade A, and why
analogy 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 3d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Forced Analogy (Structural Transplant)
What this technique does
Take the problem, strip it down to its bare structure — who the actors are, what flows between them, where it jams — and find a system in a distant domain that has the same shape. An immune system, an air-traffic control tower, a restaurant kitchen at dinner rush. Then ask what that system does about the jam that you don't, and carry the mechanism back as a concrete idea. The point is distance: the further the source domain sits from your problem, the more its solutions will look nothing like the ones already on your whiteboard.
Source: Synectics (William J.J. Gordon, Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity, 1961), specifically the "direct analogy" operation; widely used in biomimicry and TRIZ-adjacent practice.
Workflow
Step 1: Confirm the target
A valid target is a concrete creative or design problem: how to grow something, how to route something, how to redesign a process or a system. If it is unclear, ask one focused question — "What's the system you're trying to reshape, and where does it jam?"
Refuse requests to perform analytical work — debugging, reviewing code, implementing a change — and suggest an analytical approach instead. Redesigning or ideating about such a process is a valid creative target: "reinvent our code-review ritual" is in scope; "review this PR" is not.
Step 2: State the problem's structure in one sentence
Reduce the target to actors, flows, and the bottleneck. No domain vocabulary, no solution language — just the shape. For example: "many independent producers, one congested channel, quality varies." This sentence is the load-bearing part of the whole technique; if it still names your industry, it is not abstract enough yet.
Step 3: Draw 3-5 domains whose structure rhymes
Pull from references/domain-pool.md. Choose domains whose structural property matches the sentence from Step 2, not domains that sound related to your problem. Mix at least one biological, one operational, and one social/cultural so the transplants come from genuinely different logics. Never run more than five in a batch.
What ships with it
2 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.
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.
- 3d ago First seen · 67 lines · 131 tokens per session scan A 657f20d71478
analogy is a skill published in the GitHub repository danium/lateral-thinking (286 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 131 tokens to every session and 1,357 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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