auction

A decision aid that ranks the real obstacles blocking a project. It scores each obstacle by how much it matters, how certain it is, how quickly it can be removed, and the risk of ignoring it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list blockers, calculate their priorities with the ratchet command-line tool, and choose the one obstacle to address first.
Why use it?
It helps when there are many possible tasks and prevents time being spent on interesting work that does not move the project forward.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ratchet plugin — 23 skills, 3 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

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/megaprompting/torque-loop/auction
Any agent
npx skills add Megaprompting/torque-loop --skill auction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Megaprompting/torque-loop

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ratchet, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 23 skills, 3 agents, 3 hooks.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 558 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 $0.00068 $0.00558
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00279
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00112
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00056

Measured 3d ago against content hash ec38ca3d468f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

auction 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 3d 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.

skills/auction/SKILL.md · 62 lines

What it actually says

/ratchet:auction — friction auction

Not all obstacles deserve your attention. This command runs a sealed auction where blockers bid for your effort, and the highest-leverage one wins. It exists to stop you from doing work that is interesting but does not advance the target.

Step 0 — Load state

ratchet status

Procedure

  1. Enumerate the real blockers between the current state and the locked target's proof-of-done. Real means: if unsolved, the target does not ship. Exclude anything that is merely uncomfortable or merely interesting.

  2. Score each blocker on four 1–10 axes:

    • Leverage — how much unblocking it frees downstream (10 = unblocks everything).
    • Certainty — how sure you are it is actually the blocker (10 = proven).
    • Time-to-unblock — how fast it can be cleared (10 = fast, 1 = slow grind).
    • Risk — cost of ignoring it (10 = the whole thing fails if left).
  3. Compute priority with the CLI so the math is reproducible:

    ratchet score friction '[{"name":"...","leverage":9,"certainty":8,"speed":6,"risk":9}, ...]'
    

    Priority = Leverage × Certainty × Time-to-unblock × Risk. Highest priority wins.

  4. Defend the winner. State why it beats the most tempting alternative — usually the one that is more fun, more visible, or already familiar.

  5. Name the artifact that removes the winning bottleneck. That artifact is the target of the next /ratchet:build.

Output contract

FRICTION TABLE: <the ranked table from the CLI>
WINNING BOTTLENECK: <name + priority>
BEATS: <tempting alternative> because <load-bearing reason>
REQUIRED ARTIFACT: <what to build to clear it>

Serialize

ratchet state set bottleneck "<winning blocker>"
ratchet state set phase auction

Next: /ratchet:cut to make sure the bottleneck is real before you spend on it, then /ratchet:build.

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. 3d ago First seen · 62 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A ec38ca3d468f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

auction is a skill published in the GitHub repository Megaprompting/torque-loop (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 558 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

new-plugin

Factory line for adding a new HAR verification plugin (like playwright or rocketsim) for any framework — research the framework docs, build the template under src/templates/plugins/, register it everywhere, validate on a real repository, and open a PR. Use when asked to add/create a plugin, plugin template, or…

os-factory/har · 89 tokens

factory-line

Factory line for executing one station of a declared multi-station program — read the installed line bundle (har line status), plan parallel work into isolated HAR slots, run the cumulative gate with har line gate, and hand off for human review. Use when asked to "run a factory line", "run the next station", "execute…

os-factory/har · 101 tokens

v1-milestone

Factory line for executing one milestone of the HAR v1.0.0 refactor (epic os-factory/har#225) — plan the wave of parallel subagents, implement each issue in its own HAR slot, ship stacked PRs, run the fixture-e2e milestone gate, and hand off for review. Use when asked to "run the next v1 milestone", "work on v1.0.0"…

os-factory/har · 110 tokens

ctx

Codebase intelligence and evidence-driven governance with the indexed ctx CLI. Use when exploring an unfamiliar repository, locating symbols or callers, checking for existing implementations, estimating change impact, enforcing architecture rules, scoring a branch, finding hotspots or duplication, or analyzing…

agentis-tools/ctx · 60 tokens

ctx

Codebase intelligence and evidence-driven governance with the indexed ctx CLI. Use when exploring an unfamiliar repository, locating symbols or callers, checking for existing implementations, estimating change impact, enforcing architecture rules, scoring a branch, finding hotspots or duplication, or analyzing…

agentis-tools/ctx · 60 tokens

security-ownership-map

Analyze git repositories to build a security ownership topology (people-to-file), compute bus factor and sensitive-code ownership, and export CSV/JSON for graph databases and visualization. Trigger only when the user explicitly wants a security-oriented ownership or bus-factor analysis grounded in git history (for…

HKUDS/DeepCode · 99 tokens