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/concept-fannpx skills add danium/lateral-thinking --skill concept-fangit 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 | $0.00124 | $0.01161 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00062 | $0.00580 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00025 | $0.00232 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00116 |
Grade A, and why
concept-fan 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 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.
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 — 63 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Concept Fan
What this technique does
Take the current solution and climb one rung up the ladder of abstraction by asking "what is this a way of doing?" The answer is the direction — the broader purpose the solution was only ever one route toward. From that vantage, fan out alternative concepts that serve the same direction, then drop each promising concept back down into concrete implementations. The move that unlocks everything is the climb: once you name the direction, the current solution stops looking inevitable and becomes just one branch among several.
Source: Edward de Bono, Serious Creativity (1992).
Workflow
Step 1: Confirm the target
A valid target is a current solution or approach — something already on the table, not a blank page. "We send onboarding emails, is that the right move?" is a target. "Give me onboarding ideas" is not; there is nothing to climb from. If the target is a blank page, ask one focused question: "What's the current approach you'd be climbing up from?"
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: Climb
Ask "what is this a way of doing?" The answer names the direction the current solution was serving. Then ask the same question of that answer, to climb one more rung.
Two climbs maximum. A third almost always lands on something so broad ("deliver value", "help users") that nothing meaningful fans from it — you have climbed off the problem entirely. Stop at two and stay in contact with the ground.
Step 3: Fan out
At each level you climbed to, list 3–4 alternative concepts that also serve the level directly above. These are siblings of the original solution — other ways of doing the same thing the direction demands. Fan at both levels if both produced a usable direction; the higher fan is usually the more surprising one.
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.
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.
- yesterday First seen · 63 lines · 124 tokens per session scan A be9d476e7298
concept-fan is a skill published in the GitHub repository danium/lateral-thinking (281 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 124 tokens to every session and 1,161 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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