escalation-judgment

escalation-judgment is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ianklassen/pm-skills. It costs 92 tokens per session (884 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision guide for judging whether a problem should be brought to senior leadership. Escalation means asking someone with greater authority to resolve an issue.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when teams disagree, work is blocked by authority or resources, or a significant risk may affect a launch.
Why use it?
It helps avoid both unnecessary leadership interruptions and delays on risks that need higher-level decisions or resources.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it when teams disagree, work is blocked by authority or resources, or a significant risk may affect a launch.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment
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 ianklassen/pm-skills --skill escalation-judgment
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ianklassen/pm-skills

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 escalation-judgment

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment/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 escalation-judgment

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/escalation-judgment.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 92 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 884 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.
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 $0.00092 $0.00884
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00442
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00177
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00088

Measured 10d ago against content hash e6bbc9f3c1c7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

escalation-judgment 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.

decision-skills/escalation-judgment/SKILL.md · 58 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Escalation Judgment

The judgment this encodes

Escalating too much makes you the PM whose Slack messages to leadership get skimmed. Escalating too little makes you the PM who sat on a risk that blew up a launch. Both failure modes look like "good instincts" from the inside in the moment. This skill is for catching yourself in either direction.

The decision framework

1. Is this a resource conflict, a decision you lack authority to make, or a genuine ambiguity? Or is it just hard?

Escalation is for moving something that's stuck because it needs someone else's authority or information, not for things that are merely difficult or annoying to resolve yourself. "This is hard and I want it to be someone else's problem" is a real feeling and not, on its own, a reason to escalate.

2. Have you tried the working-level path first, and can you say so?

A leader hearing an escalation will almost always ask "what have you tried?" If the honest answer is "nothing yet," you're not ready: go try the direct conversation, the async doc, the peer negotiation first. Escalating past that step burns credibility and also often turns out to be unnecessary once the direct conversation happens.

3. What is the actual cost of the delay this would cause if you wait one more cycle?

Some things genuinely can't wait for the next 1:1 or staff meeting (a launch-blocking legal question, a security issue, a customer commitment about to be broken). Most things can wait slightly longer than they feel like they can. Name the concrete cost of waiting; if you can't, you probably can wait.

4. Are you escalating the problem, or the emotion about the problem?

A frustrating stakeholder interaction and a genuine project risk can feel identical in the moment. Before escalating, separate what's actually blocking the work from what's just aggravating to deal with. Escalate the former; find another outlet (a peer, a skip-level 1:1, venting to a friend) for the latter.

Fast reference

Read the full file on GitHub · 58 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.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 58 lines · 92 tokens per session scan A e6bbc9f3c1c7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

escalation-judgment is a skill published in the GitHub repository ianklassen/pm-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 92 tokens to every session and 884 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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