think-issue-tree

think-issue-tree is a skill for Claude Code from product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills. It costs 145 tokens per session (1,459 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A branching outline that breaks one broad or unclear question into smaller questions until each part can be answered with data or judgment. MECE means branches do not overlap and together cover the parent question.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to break down questions such as why sales are falling, where profit is being lost, or whether to launch a feature into non-overlapping areas for analysis.
Why use it?
It prevents missing an important category or counting the same issue twice. It also makes a complex investigation easier to divide among people or tackle in priority order.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the thinking-framework-skills plugin — 68 skills, 10 commands, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to break down questions such as why sales are falling, where profit is being lost, or whether to launch a feature into non-overlapping areas for analysis.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree
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 product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills --skill think-issue-tree
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install thinking-framework-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 68 skills, 10 commands, 1 agent.

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 think-issue-tree

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree/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 think-issue-tree

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-issue-tree.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 145 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,459 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 $0.00145 $0.01459
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.00730
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00292
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00146

Measured 9d ago against content hash c11019f8a23b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

think-issue-tree 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.

skills/think-issue-tree/SKILL.md · 66 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Issue Tree

A big question like "why are sales down?" cannot be answered as posed; it has to be broken into parts. An issue tree decomposes one question top-down into a structured set of sub-questions, recursively, until the leaves are small enough to answer directly. The load-bearing constraint is MECE: at every branch the children must be Mutually Exclusive (no two overlap) and Collectively Exhaustive (together they cover the whole parent, with nothing important left outside). That discipline forces coverage, prevents double-counting, and makes the decomposition inspectable - a reader can challenge one branch instead of arguing a wall of prose. The output is an issue tree, not a discussion, and it restructures the question rather than answering it.

When to Use

  • A question is too broad, ambiguous, or multi-cause to answer as posed ("why is churn rising?", "where is our margin leaking?", "should we launch a free tier?").
  • Analysis must be split so work can be parallelized or prioritized across non-overlapping branches.
  • Coverage matters: missing a whole category of cause or option would be costly, so collective-exhaustiveness has real value.
  • Early in a diagnosis or strategy workflow, to turn an unanswerable prompt into a tractable set of answerable parts.

When NOT to Use

  • The question is simple or already has an obvious structure. Decomposing a one-step question into a tree is overhead and false rigor.
  • To evaluate whether a given argument or recommendation is sound. That is reasoning over an answer that already exists - use think-argument-mapping. An issue tree decomposes a question top-down before any answer exists; an argument map lays out the support and objections for an answer already on the table.
  • To organize existing notes, findings, or observations bottom-up into themes. That is clustering from the data - use think-affinity-mapping. An issue tree imposes a top-down split before gathering; affinity mapping discovers structure from what is already gathered.
  • As the answer. A clean tree restructures the question; it does not resolve it. Stopping at a pretty tree without driving the leaves to data or judgment is the central misuse.

Read the full file on GitHub · 66 lines

Files

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.

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. 9d ago First seen · 66 lines · 145 tokens per session scan A c11019f8a23b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

think-issue-tree is a skill published in the GitHub repository product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills (15 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 1,459 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

ops-demo

CocoOps demo mode activator — populates .cocoplus/ops/demo/ with realistic mock data and sets cocoplus.toml [demo] enabled = true. Invoked via $ops demo.

Snowflake-Labs/cocoplus · 46 tokens

acl-rule-analysis

Vendor-agnostic ACL and firewall rule analysis with shadowed rule detection, overly permissive rule identification, unused rule discovery, redundant rule flagging, and rule ordering optimization. Covers ACLs (Cisco/JunOS/EOS) and firewall policies (PAN-OS/FortiGate/CheckPoint).

LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills · 64 tokens

add-analytics

Add Google Analytics 4 tracking to any project. Detects framework, adds tracking code, sets up events, and configures privacy settings.

LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills · 32 tokens

agent-teams-simplify-and-harden

Implementation + audit loop using parallel agent teams with structured simplify, harden, and document passes. Spawns implementation agents to do the work, then audit agents to find complexity, security gaps, and spec deviations, then loops until code compiles cleanly, all tests pass, and auditors find zero issues or…

LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills · 115 tokens

agent-team-orchestration

Orchestrate multi-agent teams with defined roles, task lifecycles, handoff protocols, and review workflows. Use when: (1) Setting up a team of 2+ agents with different specializations, (2) Defining task routing and lifecycle (inbox → spec → build → review → done), (3) Creating handoff protocols between agents, (4)…

LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills · 102 tokens

agent-bom-enforce

Enforce security policies on MCP tool calls and block dangerous operations at runtime. Use when: "block risky calls", "apply policy", "proxy", "runtime protection", "policy enforcement", "intercept MCP calls".

LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills · 50 tokens