think-pairwise-comparison

think-pairwise-comparison is a skill for Claude Code from product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills. It costs 73 tokens per session (2,324 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A way to rank options by judging them two at a time instead of assigning absolute scores. Each option is compared with every other option, and the wins produce a ranking while cycles reveal inconsistent judgments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to rank products, proposals, candidates, or other options when there are no clear criteria or reliable numerical scores.
Why use it?
It avoids unstable questions such as whether something deserves a 7 or a 9 when no shared scoring scale exists. Comparing two items at once is often easier to repeat consistently.

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 rank products, proposals, candidates, or other options when there are no clear criteria or reliable numerical scores.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-pairwise-comparison
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-pairwise-comparison
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-pairwise-comparison

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-pairwise-comparison"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills/think-pairwise-comparison.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 73 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,324 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 $0.00073 $0.02324
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.01162
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00465
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00232

Measured 10d ago against content hash 4b1aad6f46b0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

think-pairwise-comparison 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 10d 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-pairwise-comparison/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pairwise Comparison

Ranking a set of options holistically forces an unstable judgment: "rank these six from best to worst" or "score each from 1 to 10" demands a fixed internal scale and a memory of how earlier items were scored, and that scale wobbles. Pairwise comparison replaces the one hard holistic ranking with a series of isolated two-item judgments. For every pair it asks the single easier question - which of these two is better? - then tallies each item's wins into a matrix and reads the ranking off the tally. The durable move is psychophysical: a person (or an agent) holds a far more stable signal for "A beats B" than for "A is a 7," because the binary judgment needs no absolute scale and no criteria axis. The matrix also exposes its own quality - a cycle (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A) is a visible inconsistency to revisit, not a hidden error.

The output is a binary-vote comparison matrix: every pair judged A-beats-B, the derived ranking (each option's win count, ties broken by head-to-head), and a consistency check that surfaces any cycles. There is deliberately no criteria column and no absolute score. This is the narrow, honest reading of the technique - rank when you cannot score - and it is scoped precisely to the case the weighted-matrix skills disclaim.

When to Use

  • Items must be ordered, but no one can defend a 1-to-10 scale and the criteria that would justify a score genuinely cannot be articulated (qualitative artifacts - writing samples, design submissions, shortlisted proposals - where holistic marking is noisy).
  • The decision-maker can reliably say "this one beats that one" for any pair, even though they cannot say "this one is a 7."
  • The set is small enough to compare every pair by hand (roughly up to 6-8 items; the full set is n(n-1)/2 judgments - 15 for six items, 28 for eight).
  • A surfaced cycle (an intransitivity) would be useful information - a prompt to re-examine two judgments - rather than noise to suppress.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 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. 10d ago First seen · 72 lines · 73 tokens per session scan A 4b1aad6f46b0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

think-pairwise-comparison is a skill published in the GitHub repository product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills (15 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 73 tokens to every session and 2,324 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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