narrow-gate-strategy

narrow-gate-strategy is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 117 tokens per session (2,166 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A strategy framework for choosing a difficult path that is right for the business and becomes more valuable over time. It focuses on durable advantages rather than quick, easy wins.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps evaluate long-term investments, moat-building efforts, persistence-versus-pivot decisions, and whether resources are creating lasting value.
Why use it?
It helps teams decide whether slow progress reflects worthwhile long-term work or a path that should be abandoned.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps evaluate long-term investments, moat-building efforts, persistence-versus-pivot decisions, and whether resources are creating lasting value.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy
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.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill narrow-gate-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

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 narrow-gate-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for narrow-gate-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/narrow-gate-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,166 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00117 $0.02166
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01083
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00433
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00217

Measured 9d ago against content hash 18412b8752b9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

narrow-gate-strategy 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 9d 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.

narrow-gate-strategy/SKILL.md · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Narrow Gate Strategy

Overview

The narrow gate is the path that is genuinely difficult, genuinely right, and genuinely compounding — avoided by most who prefer immediate legibility over long-term leverage. Three simultaneous conditions: (1) hard enough to deter most, (2) right — builds durable value not just scar tissue, (3) compounds — each phase creates conditions for the next to generate disproportionate returns.

Composes with [second-order-thinking] (map long-game consequences before choosing), [margin-of-safety] (prevent overextension in lean phases), and [okr-goal-setting] (orient goals toward phase structure, not short-cycle legibility metrics).

When to Use

  • Choosing which capability, market, or technology to invest in over a multi-year horizon.
  • Evaluating whether to persist or pivot when a hard path is showing slow early returns.
  • Designing a moat-building strategy requiring patient accumulation rather than fast acquisition.
  • Auditing whether current resource allocation is building durable advantage or appearing busy.
  • When facing the temptation to "do what's working for everyone else."

When NOT to use: Path is hard but wrong (not a narrow gate). Vindication horizon exceeds survival window. Speed dominates compounding. "Narrow gate" is rationalizing sunk cost.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: user has a concrete case → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: user unfamiliar or no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. What it is: Narrow Gate Strategy — choose the path that is hard, right, and compounding; build it phase by phase instead of the wide crowded path that looks easier but leads to mediocre outcomes.
  2. Check fit: "Is there an 'obvious' move most people in your domain are making? What hard thing would very few attempt, and would it compound into structural advantage?"
  3. Elicit the real case: "Describe both the wide gate and the narrow gate. What makes the narrow gate hard — and what makes it right?"

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Run The Process one step at a time: Map each of the four phases for their specific situation.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close by naming the insight: "What structural advantage would you have after all four phases that the wide gate could never produce? Name it."

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 lines

Files

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.

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. 9d ago First seen · 121 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 18412b8752b9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

narrow-gate-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 2,166 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

edge-tts

Text-to-speech conversion using uvx edge-tts for generating audio from text. Use when (1) User requests audio/voice output with the "tts" trigger or keyword. (2) Content needs to be spoken rather than read (multitasking, accessibility, driving, cooking). (3) User wants a specific voice, speed, pitch, or format for TTS…

aahl/skills · 85 tokens

mcp-deepwiki

Skills for accessing and searching docs in DeepWiki/GitHub’s public code repositories can help users understand open-source project source codes, and users can also ask questions directly about the code docs.

aahl/skills · 44 tokens

tianqi

A weather-lookup workflow for Chinese locations, covering forecasts, hourly conditions, weather warnings, and daily-life indexes.

aahl/skills · 24 tokens

compliance-check

Compliance pre-flight for a feature, campaign, or initiative — maps the data and activity involved, checks applicable regimes (privacy/GDPR-style, consumer protection, marketing rules, sector-specific), lists required approvals and notices, builds a gap list with remediation owners, and ends in a go/no-go…

alebgl77/claude-inc · 98 tokens

plan-payroll

Plans payroll cash: true loaded cost per hire (gross plus employer taxes, benefits, tools), a payroll calendar with cutoffs and cash-out dates, a scenario table for new hire vs raise vs contractor-vs-employee, and a payroll-to-revenue check against rough industry bands. Use when the user asks "can I afford to hire"…

alebgl77/claude-inc · 0 tokens

ui-ux-pro-max

Builds an end-to-end UI system for a product — design tokens (color scale, type scale, spacing, radii, shadows), a component inventory covering every interaction state, a layout grid, and WCAG contrast checks — emitted as CSS variables plus a component spec doc. Use when the user says "set up a design system", "create…

alebgl77/claude-inc · 102 tokens