theory-of-constraints

theory-of-constraints is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from pproenca/dot-skills. It costs 217 tokens per session (1,867 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A process-improvement method based on the Theory of Constraints, which says that one bottleneck usually limits the output of a workflow or system.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps diagnose and improve CI and build pipelines, development workflows, agent skills, plugins, and runtime code paths when work queues up or delivery is slow.
Why use it?
It helps teams focus improvement work on the stage that actually limits speed, cost, or throughput instead of optimising parts that do not affect the final result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Good fit It helps diagnose and improve CI and build pipelines, development workflows, agent skills, plugins, and runtime code paths when work queues up or delivery is slow.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints
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.

Any agent
npx skills add pproenca/dot-skills --skill theory-of-constraints
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pproenca/dot-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 theory-of-constraints

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints/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 theory-of-constraints

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/theory-of-constraints.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 217 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,867 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00217 $0.01867
Opus 5 $0.00109 $0.00933
Sonnet 5 $0.00043 $0.00373
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00187

Measured 8d ago against content hash 182be4ff67fe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

theory-of-constraints 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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (references/queries/five-focusing-steps.sh, references/queries/measure-stage-times.sh, references/queries/measure-wip.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/.experimental/theory-of-constraints/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Theory of Constraints

A diagnostic runbook for optimizing any process — a CI/build pipeline, a dev value stream, an Agent Skill or plugin, or a runtime code path — through Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (ToC).

The one idea that makes ToC powerful: every system has exactly one binding constraint at a time, and global throughput rises only when you improve that constraint. Effort spent anywhere else produces nothing — "an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage." This runbook finds the constraint with measurement, then walks the Five Focusing Steps to relieve it without creating new problems.

When to Apply

Use this skill when the user wants to optimize a process or workflow and any of these are true:

  • They want to optimize but don't know where to start ("make this faster", "why is this slow", "reduce the cost of this").
  • A local speedup didn't move the end-to-end result (you optimized the wrong thing).
  • Work, queues, or WIP pile up at one stage while others sit idle.
  • Everything looks 100% busy but little ships (high utilization, low throughput).
  • They added capacity, parallelism, or resources and it didn't help.
  • Fixing one bottleneck just surfaces another.
  • The real limiter is a policy or rule, not a resource (a mandatory full test suite, serialized review, a "read every reference" instruction, batch-everything releases).
  • They're stuck in a tradeoff that blocks the obvious fix ("faster vs safer", "smaller context vs more coverage").

Do not use this skill for:

  • A specific, already-localized hotspot where the constraint is known — go straight to the fix (e.g. an O(n²) loop → complexity-optimizer).
  • Pure correctness/quality review with no throughput goal — use a code-review skill.
  • Micro-optimizing a stage you have not yet proven is the constraint. That is the cardinal ToC error; this skill exists to stop it.

The Process of Ongoing Improvement (POOGI)

ToC is a loop, not a one-shot. Always run it in order — exploiting before elevating is what separates ToC from "just throw resources at it."

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 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. 8d ago First seen · 102 lines · 217 tokens per session scan A 182be4ff67fe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

theory-of-constraints is a skill published in the GitHub repository pproenca/dot-skills (207 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 217 tokens to every session and 1,867 once invoked, about $0.0011 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 2026-09-03.