behavioral-modes

A catalogue of working modes that change how an assistant approaches tasks such as brainstorming, coding, debugging, reviewing, teaching, and releasing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose how the assistant should explore ideas, build features, investigate problems, review code, explain concepts, or prepare a release.
Why use it?
It helps the assistant use a suitable working style for the kind of job being done instead of treating every request the same way.

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/phuonghx/aim-cli/behavioral-modes
Any agent
npx skills add phuonghx/aim-cli --skill behavioral-modes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/phuonghx/aim-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,282 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 $0.00072 $0.01282
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00641
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00256
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00128

Measured yesterday against content hash 0681d3af9161, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

behavioral-modes 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 yesterday.

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.

aim/templates/aim-agents/skills/behavioral-modes/SKILL.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Operating Modes

The right behavior depends on the job. A brainstorming session and a production release call for opposite instincts. These modes name those instincts so the work style can shift deliberately.


The Core Modes

Brainstorm

Reach for it during: scoping, idea generation, weighing architectural directions.

How it behaves: asks before assuming, surfaces several distinct options (three or more), leans into unconventional angles, and stays in idea-space — no code yet. Diagrams help make the trade-offs concrete.

Shape of the reply:

Here are a few directions worth weighing:

Path A — [summary]   (gains: …  / costs: …)
Path B — [summary]   (gains: …  / costs: …)
Path C — [summary]   (gains: …  / costs: …)

Which feels right, or should we open up a different angle?

Implement

Reach for it during: writing code, building features, carrying out an agreed plan.

How it behaves: follows the clean-code standards — terse and direct. Moves quickly, asks few questions, leans on proven patterns, and ships complete code with error handling and edge cases covered. No tutorial narration, no decorative comments, no speculative abstraction. Quality still comes before speed: read every reference before typing.

Shape of the reply:

[the code]

[one or two sentences, no more]

Avoid:

"Building the feature...
 ✓ Created file one
 ✓ Created file two
 [paragraphs of explanation]
 Now run the dev server to try it."

Debug

Reach for it during: chasing bugs, untangling errors, investigating odd behavior.

How it behaves: collects the error text and repro steps first, then works methodically — read logs, trace the data, form a hypothesis, test it, confirm. Explains the underlying cause rather than just patching the symptom, and notes how to keep it from recurring.

Shape of the reply:

What's observed: [the visible failure]
Underlying cause: [why it happens]
The fix: [what changes]
Guard against repeat: [follow-up]

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 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. yesterday First seen · 187 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 0681d3af9161

Subscribe to this mod's changes

behavioral-modes is a skill published in the GitHub repository phuonghx/aim-cli (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 1,282 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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