pick-model

pick-model is a skill for Claude Code from digital-stoic-org/agent-skills. It costs 107 tokens per session (1,369 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A task-routing skill that checks whether the current AI model and reasoning level suit the work. It can recommend changing the reasoning level or switching models while considering the cost of rereading the conversation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing a model or reasoning level, such as deciding whether Haiku is enough or whether to use Sonnet or Opus. It is for routing decisions, not for carrying out the task itself.
Why use it?
It helps avoid using a model that is unnecessarily expensive or too limited for the task.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: effort in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the dstoic plugin — 14 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when choosing a model or reasoning level, such as deciding whether Haiku is enough or whether to use Sonnet or Opus. It is for routing decisions, not for carrying out the task itself.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model
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 digital-stoic-org/agent-skills --skill pick-model
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install dstoic, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills.

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 pick-model

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model/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 pick-model

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-model.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,369 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 4
    Skill selects an external model or provider that may use a different account or billing plan than the operator expects. Undisclosed model switches can cause unexpected cost or quota consumption.
    Fix: Remove the model/provider override or disclose it prominently and require explicit operator approval before invoking an external coding CLI or billed model.
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 $0.00107 $0.01369
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00685
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00274
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00137

Measured 8d ago against content hash b915294ba8d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pick-model 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 8d 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.

dstoic/skills/pick-model/SKILL.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pick Model

Take the user's intended prompt as input. Do NOT execute it. Read the live session state, classify the prompt, emit verdict + delta + strategy: is the current model right, and if not, is switching worth the cache cost.

CLAUDE.md contract: this skill is the single source of truth for the model/effort routing call. CLAUDE.md "Execution defaults" carries no model table — it defers here by capability (auto-discovery on the description). Don't re-derive or duplicate the tier table elsewhere; if routing changes, it changes here.

Two levers, different cost (the core call):

  • 🎚️ Effort change, same model → cache SURVIVES (cheap). Recommend freely.
  • 🔀 Model switch → cache BREAKS, context re-read uncached (costly). Must beat the switch penalty.

A third lever — parallelism (linear vs fan-out, sub-agents vs Workflow) — is out of scope here. To design a skill/agent's per-step execution topology (and have it call this skill per step), use /pick-workflow.

Recognize-then-route: hit the right tier directly; reserve top-tier (Opus high / Fable) for ambiguous/big/can't-classify. Effort = output-spend, not input. See reference.md for principles, routing detail, escalators, examples.

Workflow

1. Read live state

pick-model-state

Emits model= ctx_tokens= ctx_pct= cache_hit_pct= cost_usd= duration_min= (jq + path resolution live in dstoic/scripts/pick-model-state, on PATH). Bare call — no shell expansion, so it's allowlistable and won't trigger a permission prompt. Don't compute these by hand. Fallback (prints state=missing, or command not found pre-sync): read model + ctx% from the statusline bar or ask user; note ⚠️ estimated state, never guess silently.

2. Classify + pick ideal model + effort

Match prompt to tier. Apply escalators (cap +1 tier). See cheatsheet + routing table in reference.md.

Tier Model Effort Shape
Chore 🟢 Haiku 4.5 none convert/format/extract/typo/lookup
Plumbing/standard 🟡 Sonnet 5 lowhigh (default medium) GTD/commit, single-file code, content, review, agentic tool use, light multi-file
Thinking 🔴 Opus 4.8 highxhigh (⚠️ defaults high) strategy, hard 3+ file refactor, architecture, security/audit, PhD-reasoning
Boulder 🟣 Fable 5 adaptive multi-day, >200K context, sustained ambiguity

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. 8d ago First seen · 87 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A b915294ba8d2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pick-model is a skill published in the GitHub repository digital-stoic-org/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,369 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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