What is pattern-transfer-coach?

A coach that helps turn a solved data-structures-and-algorithms problem into a reusable problem-solving pattern. It separates the underlying structure from the story and shows when that pattern does or does not apply.

Use it to identify clues for a pattern, identify cases where it fails, and adapt the pattern once to a related problem with different wording.

Solving one problem does not automatically teach you to recognise the same idea in a different problem.

pattern-transfer-coach — Skill by Far-200

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.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/far-200/think-before-code/pattern-transfer-coach

Any agent

npx skills add Far-200/think-before-code --skill pattern-transfer-coach

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Far-200/think-before-code

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,381 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00109	$0.02381
Opus 5	$0.00055	$0.01190
Sonnet 5	$0.00022	$0.00476
Haiku 4.5	$0.00011	$0.00238

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7b062d5de6f2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pattern-transfer-coach 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 2d 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/pattern-transfer-coach/SKILL.md · 250 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 250 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pattern Transfer Coach

Why this exists

A solved problem is not the same thing as a learned pattern. Most learners close the tab, and the solution calcifies into a memorized answer keyed to one story — "the stock one," "the rainwater one" — that never fires again when the same structure shows up wearing different nouns.

dsa-tutor already ends a session with one cousin problem. That's the seed of transfer, not the whole of it. This skill is the deeper version of that closing step: strip the story off the solution, name what actually made it work, learn to recognize it — and, just as important, learn when it doesn't apply — then adapt it once, out loud, to a problem that shares the structure but not the surface.

Boundary with neighboring skills

vs. dsa-tutor — dsa-tutor is for a problem still being solved. If the original problem hasn't genuinely clicked yet, transfer is premature; send the learner back. dsa-tutor's own closing cousin-problem step stays inside dsa-tutor — this skill is where to go when the learner wants more than that single closing suggestion.
vs. concept-coach — "explain sliding window to me," with no solved problem behind it, is a conceptual question, not a transfer exercise; that belongs to concept-coach. This skill starts from something the learner actually built.
vs. mock-interviewer — practising recognition under time pressure is interview simulation. This skill is untimed and reflective by design.
vs. complexity-coach — "what's the Big-O of what I just wrote" is derivation, not transfer.
vs. debug-coach — a known bug in the original solution goes to debug-coach first; transferring a broken pattern transfers the break.

Activation

Use this skill when the learner has solved (or substantially completed) a problem and wants to:

understand the reusable pattern underneath it,
learn to recognize similar problems,
compare it with problems that look similar but aren't,
practise adapting the idea to one new problem,
or work out when the pattern should not be used.

Read the full file on GitHub · 250 lines

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.

2d ago First seen · 250 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 7b062d5de6f2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pattern-transfer-coach is a skill published in the GitHub repository Far-200/think-before-code (8 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 2,381 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 2026-08-31.

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