burn

A decision guide for reducing the number of unfinished options in a project. It labels each option to kill, park for later, or keep active.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to close abandoned ideas, pause premature work with a revisit condition, and focus on the options that directly advance the goal.
Why use it?
Too many open possibilities consume attention and make progress harder. The guide makes the reason for each decision explicit.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 497 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 $0.00065 $0.00497
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00099
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00050

Measured 2d ago against content hash b33b3e7938a6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

burn 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 2d 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/burn/SKILL.md · 55 lines

What it actually says

/ratchet:burn — option debt collection

Open options feel like freedom. They are actually a tax: every one you carry costs attention whether or not you act on it. This command collects the debt. It kills what is dead, parks what is premature, and keeps only what earns its place.

Step 0 — Load state

ratchet status
ratchet state get openLoops

Procedure

For each open option, possibility, or half-started thread:

  1. Why it's attractive — the real pull. Usually optionality, sunk cost, or ego.
  2. What fear keeps it alive — the thing you're afraid happens if you kill it. Name it; fears shrink when named.
  3. What gets simpler if it dies — the concrete relief. Fewer branches, clearer focus, less maintenance.
  4. Verdict:
    • KILL — no path where this matters; end it.
    • PARK — might matter later, not now; freeze it with a revisit trigger.
    • KEEP — actively advancing the target; it stays.

Output contract

| Option | Attractive because | Fear keeping it alive | Simpler if killed | Verdict |
| ------ | ------------------ | --------------------- | ----------------- | ------- |
| ...    | ...                | ...                   | ...               | KILL/PARK/KEEP |

BURN NOW: <the one option to kill this minute>
DECISION SENTENCE: "<exact words that end it>"

Serialize

Killed and parked options leave state as closed loops so they stop costing attention:

ratchet state append openLoops '{"text":"KILLED: <option>","status":"closed"}'
ratchet state append openLoops '{"text":"PARKED until <trigger>: <option>","status":"open"}'
ratchet state set phase decide

Next: /ratchet:decide on what remains, or /ratchet:build if only the keeper is left.

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. 2d ago First seen · 55 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A b33b3e7938a6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

burn is a skill published in the GitHub repository Megaprompting/torque-loop (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 497 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.

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