automation-strategy

automation-strategy is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 86 tokens per session (3,119 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision guide for choosing what to automate, whether to use a service or custom code, and what reliability rules the automation should follow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to estimate return on investment, compare build-versus-buy options, choose an automation platform, and diagnose why multiple automated processes keep breaking.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from building automations that are not worth the effort or that repeatedly fail in production. It also clarifies which tool or follow-up skill should handle the build.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it to estimate return on investment, compare build-versus-buy options, choose an automation platform, and diagnose why multiple automated processes keep breaking.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-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 ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill automation-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

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 automation-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-strategy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-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 automation-strategy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/automation-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,119 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 $0.00086 $0.03119
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01559
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00624
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00312

Measured 10d ago against content hash 09b39154e046, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

automation-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 10d 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.

skills/automation-strategy/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Automation strategy — decide whether, where, and how before anyone builds

This is the discipline layer of the automation suite. It answers three questions that come before the first node is wired: should this be automated at all?, on what platform, and is a platform even the right tool vs code?, and what orchestration guarantees does every automation have to meet so the fleet doesn't rot? No platform API, no importable JSON, no code lives here — the moment the decision is made, you route to the skill that builds it.

Building the flow (design + importable artifact) → ../automation-flows/SKILL.md. Driving a specific platform's live API/MCP → ../n8n/SKILL.md, ../make/SKILL.md, ../zapier/SKILL.md, ../power-automate/SKILL.md. A typed API client in code → ../api-connector-builder/SKILL.md. Receiving webhooks in your own app → ../webhooks/SKILL.md.

Every fact about pricing and platform capability below moves fast. Treat the figures as hedges and re-check the vendor page at author time; the honest limits (Zapier can't create Zaps via public API; Power Automate can't create end-user "My flows" cleanly via API) are called out where they matter and expanded in the references.

1. Should you automate at all?

Most "we should automate this" instincts are wrong — not because automation is bad, but because the process underneath isn't ready, or the payoff isn't there. Gate on four factors, all of them, before writing a line:

  • Frequency — how many times per week/month does this run? A once-a-quarter task rarely earns its maintenance cost.
  • Time saved per run — minutes of human toil removed each time. Two minutes × 1,000 runs beats an hour × 3.
  • Error rate of doing it by hand — high manual error rate (typos, missed steps, missed SLAs) is often a bigger win than the time saved. Automation's real product is consistency, not just speed.
  • Stability of the process — how often do the steps, the systems, or the rules change? An unstable process is the one thing that turns automation into a liability.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 10d ago First seen · 124 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 09b39154e046

Subscribe to this mod's changes

automation-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (78 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 3,119 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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