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/scampernpx skills add danium/lateral-thinking --skill scampergit 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 | $0.00132 | $0.01166 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00066 | $0.00583 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00026 | $0.00233 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00117 |
Grade A, and why
scamper 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 — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
SCAMPER
What this technique does
Take one existing thing — a feature, a product, a workflow — and push it through seven transformation lenses in fixed order. Each lens asks a different question: what could you swap out, what could you fuse it with, what could you borrow, what could you exaggerate or shrink, what else it could do, what could you cut, what could you flip. The value is coverage: the checklist forces you past the two or three variations you would have thought of unaided and into the ones you would have skipped. It is a divergent tool for an idea that already exists, not a way to invent one from nothing.
Source: Bob Eberle, SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development (1971), building on Alex Osborn's checklist of idea-spurring questions.
Workflow
Step 1: Confirm the target
A valid target is an existing idea, artifact, or process: a shipped feature, a signup flow, a pricing model, a ritual your team runs. SCAMPER transforms something that already works; it cannot operate on a blank page. If the user brings no starting idea — "help me think of a product" — refuse and point them to a generative technique (a random-stimulus or free-association method) that manufactures ideas from nothing. This one needs raw material.
If the target is unclear, ask one focused question — "What's the existing idea, and what part of it is fixed versus open to change?" — then proceed.
Refuse requests to perform analytical work — "debug this", "review this code", "implement this change" — and suggest an analytical approach instead. But redesigning or reinventing such a process is a valid creative target: "reinvent our code-review ritual" is in scope; "review this PR" is not.
Step 2: Run all seven operations in order
Work the lenses in sequence — Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify/Magnify, Put to other use, Eliminate, Reverse/Rearrange. For each one, pull 3-4 pointed questions from references/question-bank.md and answer only the ones that actually bite against this target. Ignore the rest; the bank is a menu, not a form.
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.
- yesterday First seen · 62 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A c4369beda896
scamper is a skill published in the GitHub repository danium/lateral-thinking (281 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 1,166 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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