escalate

escalate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Kastalien-Research/thoughtbox. It costs 25 tokens per session (285 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured format for asking the main human decision-maker to resolve a problem or approve a significant choice.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document prioritization, scope, dependency, timeline, irreversible-action, budget, repeated-failure, or shippability decisions with risks, tradeoffs, and a recommendation.
Why use it?
It makes the situation, impact, root cause, attempted solutions, and available options clear when work has reached an escalation threshold.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/kastalien-research/thoughtbox/escalate
Any agent
npx skills add Kastalien-Research/thoughtbox --skill escalate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Kastalien-Research/thoughtbox

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 escalate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kastalien-research/thoughtbox/escalate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kastalien-research/thoughtbox/escalate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kastalien-research/thoughtbox/escalate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kastalien-research/thoughtbox/escalate.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 285 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00025 $0.00285
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00143
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00057
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00028

Measured 5d ago against content hash 041c42113998, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

escalate 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 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/ulysses.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.agents/skills/escalate/SKILL.md · 30 lines

What it actually says

Format an escalation for the following situation: $ARGUMENTS

Use this structure (based on the EscalationToChiefAgentic schema):

Escalation Type: [prioritization_decision | scope_change | external_dependency_failure | timeline_impact | irreversible_action_approval | budget_exceeded | repeated_failure | shippability_assessment]

Situation

  • Summary: [What happened, 1-2 sentences]
  • Impact: [What this means for the current plan]
  • Root cause: [Why this happened, if known]
  • What has been tried: [What the system already attempted]

Options (minimum 2):

Option Description Tradeoff Time Risk
A: [label] [what it entails] [gain vs. lose] [estimate] low/medium/high
B: [label] [what it entails] [gain vs. lose] [estimate] low/medium/high

Recommendation: [Which option and why, if applicable]

Decision deadline: [How long before this blocks progress]

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. 5d ago First seen · 30 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 041c42113998

Subscribe to this mod's changes

escalate is a skill published in the GitHub repository Kastalien-Research/thoughtbox (64 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 285 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.