scope-cut

scope-cut is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ianklassen/pm-skills. It costs 120 tokens per session (1,663 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision framework for reducing the work planned for a project, sprint, or launch while preserving its main purpose.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a smaller first release, assess what can be postponed, and separate cuttable work from commitments that need renegotiation.
Why use it?
It helps teams cut optional work deliberately instead of removing items at random or breaking promises already made to customers, partners, or the public.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to define a smaller first release, assess what can be postponed, and separate cuttable work from commitments that need renegotiation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/scope-cut
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 scope-cut
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 scope-cut

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/scope-cut"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ianklassen/pm-skills/scope-cut.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,663 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 $0.00120 $0.01663
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00831
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00333
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00166

Measured 9d ago against content hash 1c4e89c7bf88, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scope-cut 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.

decision-skills/scope-cut/SKILL.md · 100 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 100 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scope Cut

The judgment this encodes

Most scope-cutting defaults to cutting whatever's easiest to cut, or whatever the loudest stakeholder didn't ask for. Both produce a smaller release. Neither reliably produces a release that still proves what it needed to prove.

The question that actually matters: what is this release for, and does the cut version still do that? Two releases can be the same size on a ticket board and be completely different in whether they were worth shipping.

The decision framework

0. Separate what you can cut from what you can only renegotiate

Before sorting anything, identify scope that isn't actually yours to cut:

  • Publicly committed: named on a landing page, announced at an event, in a press release
  • Contractually committed: in an SLA, a signed enterprise deal, a partner integration agreement
  • Externally dependent: another team or partner has already built against it

These are not cut decisions. They're renegotiations or escalations, and treating them as cuts is how PMs blow up trust with marketing, sales, and partners. Route them out of the cut list first and handle them separately (see escalation-judgment). What remains is your actual decision space.

1. Name the riskiest assumption the release is meant to test

Every release exists to learn or prove something: that customers want this, that this technical approach scales, that this workflow reduces support load. If you can't name that in one sentence, stop and get that answer before cutting anything; you'll cut the wrong things.

2. Sort scope into three buckets, not two

  • Load-bearing: removing it means the release no longer proves what it set out to prove. Two tests, both of which must pass: (a) does the customer-visible value survive this cut, and (b) can you still tell whether it worked? The second test catches things that look like decoration but aren't: instrumentation, analytics events, logging, a control group. Invisible to customers, load-bearing to the release, and the single most commonly mis-cut category in this whole framework.
  • Supporting: makes the load-bearing part usable/credible but isn't itself the test. Candidate for cutting to a rougher version, not necessarily to zero.
  • Decoration: exists because it's nice, was requested by one loud voice, or "we're already in there." First things to go, no negotiation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 100 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. 9d ago First seen · 100 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 1c4e89c7bf88

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scope-cut is a skill published in the GitHub repository ianklassen/pm-skills (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 1,663 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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