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 lancewillett/ai-plugins --skill five-stepsgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lancewillett/ai-pluginsWrote 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/lancewillett/ai-plugins/five-steps)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lancewillett/ai-plugins/five-steps"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lancewillett/ai-plugins/five-steps/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/lancewillett/ai-plugins/five-steps"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lancewillett/ai-plugins/five-steps.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 | $0.00091 | $0.00449 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00036 | $0.00180 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00090 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00045 |
Grade A, and why
five-steps 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 1mo 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.
What it actually says
Five steps
Walk the target through all five steps, then edit it.
Why this matters
The natural instinct is to automate first. The framework forces the harder questions earlier: do we even need this requirement? Can we delete this step entirely? Only after pruning and simplifying does automation make sense.
Scope: processes, tools, products, and systems you own.
The framework
Adapted from Elon Musk's five-step "algorithm" for improving a process.
- Question every requirement—Is this necessary? Who asked for it? Would we add it if starting fresh?
- Delete parts or processes—Remove the unnecessary. Add things back 10% of the time, or you're not deleting enough.
- Simplify or optimize—Make what remains easier to work with.
- Accelerate cycle time—Speed up without sacrificing quality.
- Automate—Last, not first.
Application areas
Shaping new plans
Use the 5 steps as a checklist when co-creating plans with AI or with the team. Before any plan gets a green light, walk it through all 5 steps.
Reviewing existing systems
Periodically audit your systems against the framework:
- CI/CD pipelines—what steps can be deleted or simplified?
- Triage workflows—are we questioning requirements or just adding process?
- Testing infrastructure—what's over-engineered?
- Reporting and metrics—do we need all these dashboards?
Make the changes
Edit the target in place: cut what step 2 deleted, rewrite what survived.
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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 46 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 165ec34e3f1e
five-steps is a skill published in the GitHub repository lancewillett/ai-plugins (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 449 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.
Other skills, from other repositories
local-ai-agents
Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…
next-cache-components-adoption
Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…
insight-error-page
Write or audit an insight-kind error page for the Next.js dev overlay. Use when creating a new errors/ .mdx page, auditing an existing one, or checking that a page matches the framework fix cards. Covers page structure, title alignment, FixCard cards with Copy prompt button, code snippets, terminology verification…
next-cache-components-optimizer
Optimize the meaningful UI available immediately from a Next.js route on an initial load (hard navigation) or named client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route and entry point at a time; the shipped test then guards…