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 agentmods add skills/reviewstage/stage-cli/trade-offnpx skills add ReviewStage/stage-cli --skill trade-offgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ReviewStage/stage-cliWrote 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/reviewstage/stage-cli/trade-off)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/reviewstage/stage-cli/trade-off"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/reviewstage/stage-cli/trade-off.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.00186 | $0.02596 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00093 | $0.01298 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00037 | $0.00519 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00019 | $0.00260 |
Grade A, and why
trade-off 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 4d 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 — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Trade-off
Agents over-build by default. They add product behaviors, flows, and UI states that weren't asked for, and they reach for queues, caches, new packages, new tables, and real-time infra when nothing in the task demanded them. The cost is paid forever: more surface area for users to get confused by, more infra to operate, and more code to read, maintain, and change later.
This skill is a forcing function. At any point in the lifecycle of a task — planning, before implementation, or looking back at a diff — identify what could be cut by accepting a reasonable trade-off, and surface those cuts to the user as explicit decisions.
When to use
Invoke this any time complexity is visible. There are three natural moments:
- Planning — sketching what the feature should do. Trade-offs are cheapest here because nothing is built yet; the cut is just "don't design it in."
- Before implementing — a plan exists, you're about to write code. Last chance to cut before the work starts.
- After implementing — reviewing a diff you or another agent just produced. The cut now means deleting code, which is more expensive than not writing it, but still usually worth it.
Signals any of the three applies:
- The task spans multiple UI states, screens, or flows
- There's notification, history, undo, real-time, or bulk behavior on the surface area
- A new behavior is being added that isn't the core ask but felt "natural to include"
- The plan introduces a queue, worker, cache layer, or background job
- The plan adds a new package in the monorepo, a new database table, or a new external service
- The plan uses streaming, websockets, SSE, or other real-time infra
- A migration or backfill is being designed
- A new admin surface or auth surface is being added
- The user's request is short but the scope feels long
- The diff touches multiple files across packages when the ask named one
If the task is genuinely small and concrete and the plan/diff reflects that, skip this skill.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 158 lines · 186 tokens per session scan A 2a0ac636959d
trade-off is a skill published in the GitHub repository ReviewStage/stage-cli (267 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 186 tokens to every session and 2,596 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…