strategic-reading

strategic-reading is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from garrytan/gbrain. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,641 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for applying a book, article, transcript, or case study to one specific strategic problem. It produces an analysis and a short-, medium-, and long-term playbook rather than a general summary.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse a negotiation, power struggle, business problem, or other defined situation through the lessons of a larger source text.
Why use it?
It prevents useful ideas from staying abstract or being reduced to a summary that does not guide a real decision. The source is interpreted in the context of the situation you describe.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is **Convention:** see [conventions/quality.md](../conventions/quality.md) for.

Part of the gbrain-daily plugin — 15 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to analyse a negotiation, power struggle, business problem, or other defined situation through the lessons of a larger source text.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
About the project

GBrain is a memory and retrieval layer for AI agents that searches, connects, and synthesizes information from stored sources. It is used to give coding agents and autonomous agents access to knowledge beyond their current code, including shared company information with access controls. The catalogue add-ons help agents operate GBrain and connect it to agent workflows.

garrytan/gbrain · 29,702 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install gbrain-daily, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 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 strategic-reading

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading/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 strategic-reading

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/strategic-reading.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,641 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
  • Snyk warn 7 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, 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 Agent Snooping · line 164
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 166
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 $0.00055 $0.01641
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00821
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00328
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00164

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5be656c39c83, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

strategic-reading 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugin-variants/gbrain-daily/skills/strategic-reading/SKILL.md · 189 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 189 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

strategic-reading — Applied Analysis from Source Texts

Convention: see conventions/quality.md for citation rules (every recommendation cites the source) and back-link enforcement.

Convention: see _brain-filing-rules.md — output files by primary subject (concepts/ for general strategy, projects/ for problem-tied playbooks).

What this is

Take a large text PLUS a specific strategic problem, produce analysis that maps the text's insights onto the problem. This is not book summarization. This is reading with a mission.

Where book-mirror personalizes a book to the reader's whole life, strategic-reading personalizes it to ONE current problem. Same shape (extract → analyze → mirror), different lens.

Canonical example: a power-dynamics history book read against a specific gatekeeper-vs-incumbent fight, producing a tactical analysis that maps the book's playbook onto the situation with counter-tactics and a short/medium/long-term playbook.

Inputs

  1. Source text — book (EPUB/PDF), article, transcript, historical case study, any large document.
  2. Strategic problem — the specific situation to analyze through the lens of the text. The user describes this explicitly or it's obvious from context.

Output

The brain page is the artifact. PDF is a rendering, never primary.

Brain page structure

# [Source Title] — Applied to [Problem]

> One-paragraph executive summary: how the source maps to the situation,
> the key insight, the bottom line.

## The Core Parallel
How the source's central dynamic maps onto the user's situation.

## Chapter / Section Triage
For each major section of the source:
- 2-3 sentence summary of what it says
- Relevance to the problem: HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW
- One directly applicable quote (if any)

## The Source's Playbook
The author's framework, tactics, or strategies — organized as:
- What the protagonist DID (tactics)
- What WORKED and why
- What FAILED and why
- What OPPONENTS did that was effective

## Counter-Tactics
Specific moves from the source that map to the user's situation:
- What to DO (with source evidence)
- What to AVOID (with source evidence)
- What to WATCH FOR (warning signs from the source)

## Applied Playbook
The synthesis — actionable recommendations:
- **Short-term** (this week / this month)
- **Medium-term** (this quarter)
- **Long-term** (this year+)

## Key Quotes
Direct quotes from the source that are devastatingly relevant.
Maximum 5-10. Quality over quantity.

## See Also
Links to relevant brain pages (related concepts, related projects).

Read the full file on GitHub · 189 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. 9d ago First seen · 189 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 5be656c39c83

Subscribe to this mod's changes

strategic-reading is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gbrain (29,702 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,641 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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