pick-workflow

pick-workflow is a skill for Claude Code from digital-stoic-org/agent-skills. It costs 156 tokens per session (1,715 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for choosing how an agent task should run, such as in a sequence, in parallel, with sub-agents, or with a team.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or reviewing a skill or agent that must decide which steps can run independently and where the work should be divided.
Why use it?
It helps match the work structure to its dependencies, judgment required, and token cost instead of using the same execution pattern every time.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Part of the dstoic plugin — 14 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing or reviewing a skill or agent that must decide which steps can run independently and where the work should be divided.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-workflow
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-workflow
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-workflow

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-workflow.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-workflow)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-workflow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/digital-stoic-org/agent-skills/pick-workflow.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 156 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,715 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: 2 findings, up to high

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 →

  • high YARA Match · line 3
    YARA rule matched a hack tool or exploit indicator (offensive tools, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, or exploit frameworks).
    Fix: Remove offensive tool references and exploit code. Legitimate agent skills should not contain penetration testing tools, exploit frameworks, or reconnaissance utilities.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 6
    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 $0.00156 $0.01715
Opus 5 $0.00078 $0.00857
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00343
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00171

Measured 8d ago against content hash fe84ea9d65d0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pick-workflow 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-workflow/SKILL.md · 99 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pick Workflow

Authoring-time judge for a skill/agent's execution topology: how steps run (linear vs fan-out, which mechanism, where the seam falls). Emits a design — never runs the task. Model+effort per step is a separate call, delegated (Step 5). Own the topology decision here; don't re-derive the mechanism table or the sharding rules anywhere else.

When: authoring or challenging a skill/agent · parallel-vs-linear · which delegation mechanism.

Steps

1. Decompose — fill the table FIRST (it IS the analysis; no recommending before it exists)

Step Work shape Parallelizable? Judgment load Token weight Cross-item dep?
  • Work shape — read / classify / synthesize / transform / decide.
  • Parallelizable? — units independent? (per-file yes; "synthesize the whole plan" no.)
  • Judgment load — low (mechanical/schema-bound) → high (ordering, trade-offs, reversibility, intent).
  • Token weight — where cost sits (usually the step that reads everything).
  • Cross-item dep? — compares across units / needs the global graph? Correctness gate: a cross-item step must NOT be sharded. Two gates + worker rules in reference.md.

2. Cut the seam by global-context (NOT by folder/file)

Fan out per-item, judgment-light, independent work → workers return structured facts only (no dispositions/severity/decisions). Keep cross-item reasoning + dispositions + synthesis on the orchestrator. Canonical: gather (fan-out) → reason → plan (orchestrator) → execute (fan-out independent ops). If the execute fan-out writes, isolate each worker (isolation: "worktree") or give it unique paths — concurrent edits to one tree lose updates with no error.

3. Pick topology + mechanism

Front-door first (pattern catalog in reference.md): routing (distinct input kinds → branch before fan-out) · voting / evaluator-optimizer (need confidence or refinement). Then:

Choose When Gate
🟢 Linear below threshold; few units — the default simplest
🔵 Sub-agents (fresh ctx) fixed small set (2–6) independent tasks; worker needs a scoped brief, not your history. Name them: messaging a finished worker by name replays its whole transcript, so refine loops live here blind to each other → dedup/merge stays on the orchestrator · caps in reference.md
🍴 Fork one heavy sub-task needing your full accumulated reasoning, run isolated so its tool noise stays out of main inherits parent bias → never for verify/challenge
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team (named teammates + shared task list) workers must reason against each other: debate, competing hypotheses, cross-worker dedup with no barrier env-gated · token-heavy · 3–5 · no nesting · same-file edits collide
🟣 Workflow fan-out over a variable-size list; loop-until-dry, budget cap, schema extraction, journaled resume two barriers: user opt-in AND stripped from every sub-agent → never a default; ship a linear fallback

Read the full file on GitHub · 99 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 · 99 lines · 156 tokens per session scan A fe84ea9d65d0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pick-workflow is a skill published in the GitHub repository digital-stoic-org/agent-skills (20 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 156 tokens to every session and 1,715 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens

next-partial-prefetching-adoption

Turn on Partial Prefetching in a Next.js app and work through the insights it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable or adopt Partial Prefetching, flip the partialPrefetching flag, opt routes in with export const prefetch = 'partial', audit Link prefetch={true} behavior, preserve existing prefetched UI with…

vercel/next.js · 103 tokens

chronicle

Analyze Copilot session history for standup reports, usage tips, session search, and session reindexing. Use when the user asks for a standup, daily summary, usage tips, workflow recommendations, wants to search or find past sessions by keyword/file/PR, wants to reindex their session store, or asks about deleting…

microsoft/vscode · 72 tokens