improbable-futures

improbable-futures is a skill for Claude Code from ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit. It costs 136 tokens per session (6,847 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A product-strategy planning method that studies a project's goal and its market, then maps three clearly different possible directions. Each direction includes the user's hoped-for outcome, needed abilities, trade-offs, and a next step.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a product goal, research its field, choose a strategic direction, and give a coding agent a practical next move.
Why use it?
It helps when product advice is vague or produces several similar options without a clear choice. It connects research and strategy to concrete decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; 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 define a product goal, research its field, choose a strategic direction, and give a coding agent a practical next move.

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 improbable-futures

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/improbable-futures"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit/improbable-futures.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 136 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,847 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 $0.00136 $0.06847
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.03424
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.01369
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00685

Measured 12d ago against content hash ed4bbcbe9614, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

improbable-futures 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/improbable-futures/SKILL.md · 514 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 514 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Improbable Futures

Most product advice asks "is this good?" This skill asks better questions: "what is the goal? what strategy serves it? where could that strategy take you, and what does each path cost?"

You are a cartographer and a strategist. Read the project as it actually is. Name the goal — explicitly. Ground the analysis in real domain research, not vibes. Commit to a single strategic thesis. Then sketch three futures that execute that thesis differently — each genuinely improbable, each mutually exclusive with the other two. Pin a love-letter from a named user six months ahead to each future. Surface wild cards. Hand the builder a map AND a next move they can give to their agent.

Think of it as the Improbability Drive for product strategy: not three options that look similar, but three commitments that look mutually unreachable until you land in one of them.

Boundaries

This skill MAY: read project files, scan repos, ask the user for goal and pitch when context is thin, run targeted web research for domain best-practices and strategic-move patterns, generate a strategy + map markdown, auto-invoke /babel-fish:visualize on the output. This skill MAY NOT: edit code, run builds, write implementation plans, produce verdicts or scorecards, generate pitch-deck copy, do TAM/SAM/SOM market sizing, name real clients, attribute opinions to specific named people.

This is a strategy AND a map, not a plan. Commit to a thesis — do not implement it. Hand the next move to the user's agent — do not execute it.

Common Rationalizations

Shortcut Why It Fails The Cost
"Skip research — generate the futures from the project signal alone" Without grounded reference to what works in this category, you produce vibe-strategy. Three futures that read smart but match no real strategic move pattern. Smoothie output that the builder closes without aching
"Skip the goal — work from what the project clearly is" Projects rarely make the goal explicit. If you guess wrong, every future executes the wrong strategy. The map is geometrically correct and pointed at nothing. Builder reads three "interesting" futures and feels none of them. The goal mismatch is silent until the futures land flat
"Three plausible futures is enough" Plausible is the enemy. The brief asks for IMPROBABLE futures that are mutually exclusive — not three reasonable variations the founder could pursue in parallel. "Pick one and lose the others" turns into "pick whichever, do all three eventually" — no commitment, no map
"Love-letters can sound similar across futures — same author, same project" If all three letters read like the same person wrote them, you've written articles, not letters. Real letters have distinct voices, distinct ticks, distinct silences. Reader skims the letters as decoration. The ache that should drive choice never lands

Read the full file on GitHub · 514 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 · 514 lines · 136 tokens per session scan A ed4bbcbe9614

Subscribe to this mod's changes

improbable-futures is a skill published in the GitHub repository ondrej-svec/heart-of-gold-toolkit (19 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 136 tokens to every session and 6,847 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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