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.
npx skills add jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill apply-indirect-strategygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-coreWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-indirect-strategy)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-indirect-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-indirect-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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-indirect-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-indirect-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 5.1 | $0.00046 | $0.02154 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00862 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00431 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00215 |
Grade A, and why
apply-indirect-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 4d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Apply Indirect Strategy
Identify what the opponent's strategy depends on, attack that dependency rather than their strength, and make their position untenable without direct confrontation.
Why This Is Best Practice
Origin: Sun Tzu's most cited principle: "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." (不戰而屈人之兵, Ch.3). The chapter on Attack by Stratagem argues that attacking the opponent's strategy is superior to attacking their alliances, which is superior to attacking their army, which is superior to attacking their cities. Direct attack on strength is the lowest form of strategy.
Adopted by: B.H. Liddell Hart formalised the indirect approach as military doctrine after studying WWI's catastrophic direct-attack failures (Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele). His Strategy (1967) remains required reading at the US Army War College. Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005) is the dominant business strategy framework built on the same logic: make competition irrelevant by competing on different terrain, not on the incumbent's chosen battlefield. Amazon's distribution flywheel, Netflix's DVD-to-streaming pivot, and Apple's iTunes-to-iPod ecosystem are canonical indirect strategy executions.
Impact: Direct confrontation against an entrenched opponent is expensive, slow, and often fails. Indirect strategy wins by making the opponent's position structurally untenable — their distribution advantage becomes irrelevant, their business model becomes uneconomic, their customer relationships get bypassed. The opponent's strength becomes a liability when the rules of the game change.
Why best: Most competitive strategy defaults to direct imitation: copy the leader's features, underprice them, and fight for the same customers through the same channels. This produces commoditisation and margin destruction. Indirect strategy identifies the structural dependency the leader's position rests on and attacks that dependency, often with a fraction of the resources required for direct competition.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 114 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A d5c46fc2ee65
apply-indirect-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (5 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 2,154 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-17.
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