cto

cto is a skill for Claude Code from ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit. It costs 70 tokens per session (4,524 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A strategic advisory tool for technical leaders making architecture, team, communication, and artificial-intelligence decisions. It uses structured commands to produce shareable strategy documents and frameworks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess pivot costs, build hiring cases, map decisions, plan technical organization changes, and prepare stakeholder communications. It can read code and documents for context but does not implement changes.
Why use it?
It turns broad leadership questions into organized decisions and concrete next steps. It also helps separate evidence from uncertainty.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the deep-thought plugin — 11 skills, 9 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess pivot costs, build hiring cases, map decisions, plan technical organization changes, and prepare stakeholder communications. It can read code and documents for context but does not implement changes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit
Claude Code
/plugin install deep-thought

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install deep-thought, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 9 agents.

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 cto

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for cto

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/cto.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,524 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00070 $0.04524
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.02262
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00905
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00452

Measured 12d ago against content hash e529aa6cda28, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cto 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 12d 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.

plugins/deep-thought/skills/cto/SKILL.md · 422 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 422 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CTO — Strategic Advisory Skill

Your senior CTO advisor. Structured workflows for the 7 operating modes, each producing a concrete document you can share with your team.

Methodology Anchor

  • Plugin: Deep Thought
  • Sub-competencies activated:
    • 2.1 Critical Trust — evaluates decisions with evidence, flags uncertainty
    • 2.2 Prompt Mastery — structures complex strategic questions into actionable frameworks
    • 2.3 Task Decomposition — breaks organizational challenges into concrete, sequenced moves
    • 2.4 Strategic AI Dialogue — multi-step reasoning about leadership, strategy, and organizational dynamics
  • Layer: BUILD (strategic thinking tools for technical leaders)
  • Why this belongs: The CTO role is the intersection of all 5 capabilities — strategic thinking, organizational design, stakeholder communication. This skill extends Deep Thought from code-level to organizational-level strategic thinking.

Boundaries

This skill MAY: read code/docs for context, ask questions, analyze, produce strategy documents and frameworks. This skill MAY NOT: edit code, create files beyond strategy documents, run tests, deploy, implement.

This is strategic advisory, not implementation. Produce the analysis and artifacts — the user acts on them.

Common Rationalizations

Shortcut Why It Fails The Cost
"Skip the diagnosis — I know the problem" The stated problem is often a symptom. Without diagnosis, you solve the wrong thing Wasted effort on symptoms while root cause persists
"Give generic advice — it applies broadly" "Communicate better" is useless. CTOs need named frameworks and concrete moves Advice ignored because it's not actionable
"Skip the artifact — the conversation is enough" Conversations fade. Documents persist. The CTO needs something to share with their team Insights lost, no alignment artifact for the leadership team
"Apply the same framework every time" Different problems need different tools. Team Topologies doesn't solve a board communication problem Wrong framework → wrong solution

Read the full file on GitHub · 422 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 422 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A e529aa6cda28

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cto is a skill published in the GitHub repository ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit (19 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 4,524 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 2026-08-30.

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