inversion

A creative thinking method that lists the beliefs behind an existing plan and deliberately flips them. Each reversed belief is then tested to see whether it could be true in some situation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to question product strategies, pricing, delivery plans, onboarding flows, and other approaches before building them. It helps find alternatives that ordinary planning may miss.
Why use it?
It exposes assumptions that may be limiting a design, business plan, or workflow. This can reveal overlooked options and show which parts of the current approach are treated as fixed without good reason.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/danium/lateral-thinking/inversion
Any agent
npx skills add danium/lateral-thinking --skill inversion
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danium/lateral-thinking

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,291 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 $0.00105 $0.01291
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00646
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00258
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00129

Measured yesterday against content hash aaf568e587b7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

inversion 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.

skills/inversion/SKILL.md · 70 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 70 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Assumption Inversion

What this technique does

Every approach rests on a stack of unstated beliefs — about who the user is, what they value, how the thing gets delivered, in what order, at what price. List those beliefs, flip each one into its opposite, then ask the sharp question: where is the flipped version already true? Most flips are dead ends, and naming them dead is part of the work. The two or three flips that turn out to be true somewhere are where a non-obvious direction hides — the incumbents never looked there because the original belief felt like a law of nature.

Source: the classical dialectic method of arguing a position by its negation; popularized for business by "invert, always invert" (Carl Jacobi, via Charlie Munger) and by Edward de Bono's reversal method in Lateral Thinking (1970).

Workflow

Step 1: Confirm the target

A valid target is a design, plan, or approach whose assumptions you can list: a product strategy, a go-to-market plan, a pricing model, a workflow you are about to build, an onboarding sequence. If the target is unclear, ask one focused question — "What's the current approach, and what feels locked-in about it?"

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: Extract the assumptions

List 5–8 assumptions behind the current approach. Aim for the load-bearing ones, not decorations. These prompt categories help you cover the space rather than list five versions of the same belief:

  • The user — who they are, what they already know, what they can be trusted to do.
  • The value — what the thing is actually worth, and to whom.
  • The channel — where it reaches people and where they meet it.
  • The sequence — what has to happen first, second, last.
  • The price — who pays, how much, and when.
  • The effort split — who does the work, the provider or the user.

Read the full file on GitHub · 70 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. yesterday First seen · 70 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A aaf568e587b7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

inversion is a skill published in the GitHub repository danium/lateral-thinking (281 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 1,291 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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