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.
npx skills add product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills --skill think-backcastinggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-backcasting)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-backcasting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-backcasting/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-backcasting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-backcasting.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00084 | $0.01362 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00042 | $0.00681 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00272 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00136 |
Grade A, and why
think-backcasting 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 9d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Backcasting
Forward planning anchors on today's constraints and tends to extrapolate the status quo. Backcasting reverses the direction: it fixes a vivid, concrete desired future state first, then reasons backward to the milestones and preconditions that must be true for that future to exist, link by link, until it reaches the next concrete step available now. The reversal is what does the work - it decouples the goal from present limits, forces each milestone to name what had to be true just before it, and connects an aspirational future to something executable today. The output is a backcast path, not a discussion. This is a route to a chosen success, not a forecast and not a test of whether the goal is right.
When to Use
- Planning toward a transformative or longer-horizon goal where forward planning anchors too low and just extrapolates the present.
- A desired future has been chosen and needs a route mapped backward to the next step today.
- The milestones, dependencies, and sequencing between now and the goal need to be made explicit.
- The desired end state can be described concretely (you can say what is true once you have succeeded).
When NOT to Use
- Near-term, simple plans. When the path is short and obvious, forward planning is sufficient and the backward overhead buys nothing.
- When the goal is unsettled or unvalidated. Backcasting assumes the endpoint; it does not choose or test it. Settle the goal first with a decision or option-evaluation skill. A clean path to the wrong goal is worse than no path.
- To imagine how the plan could fail. That is a premortem (work back from failure to causes). Backcasting works back from success to the path.
- To trace forward consequences of a decision. That is a futures wheel (first/second/third-order effects radiating outward), not a goal-first backward route.
- For personal follow-through on an already-chosen goal. That is WOOP (an if-then plan for one actor's intention-action gap), not a route to a future.
What ships with it
5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 65 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 5588b3f67648
think-backcasting is a skill published in the GitHub repository product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills (14 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,362 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 2026-08-30.
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