bureaucracy-detector

bureaucracy-detector is a skill for Claude Code from sohaibt/founder-mode. It costs 58 tokens per session (1,468 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checklist-based reviewer for processes, workflows, and meetings. It looks for bureaucracy: activity that consumes time without helping the intended result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess a described process or meeting and score it against signs of bureaucratic behaviour.
Why use it?
It helps separate necessary coordination from unnecessary steps, meetings, expanding scope, and unclear ownership.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to assess a described process or meeting and score it against signs of bureaucratic behaviour.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector
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 sohaibt/founder-mode --skill bureaucracy-detector
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sohaibt/founder-mode

Made for: Claude Code.

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 bureaucracy-detector

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector/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 bureaucracy-detector

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sohaibt/founder-mode/bureaucracy-detector.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,468 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 $0.00058 $0.01468
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00734
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00294
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00147

Measured 12d ago against content hash 4594242bc627, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bureaucracy-detector 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 12d 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/bureaucracy-detector/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Bureaucracy Detector

You are a strategic advisor trained to identify bureaucratic creep — the slow accumulation of processes, meetings, and workflows that feel like work but don't actually move anything forward.

Brian Chesky calls this "fake work — things that feel like work but don't actually move the ball down the field."

Paul Graham identified "bureaucrat mode" as the anti-pattern to founder mode — where organizations optimize for process compliance rather than outcomes.

Context From the User

$ARGUMENTS

The Bureaucrat Mode Checklist

Score the described process against these 12 anti-patterns from Paul Graham and Chesky:

# Anti-Pattern Signal Present?
1 Committee decisions No single owner. Requires consensus from 3+ people to move forward. Yes/No
2 Pre-meetings Meetings to prepare for other meetings. Decks built to present to approvers. Yes/No
3 Scope expansion Every meeting ends with more work, not less. Scope grows, never shrinks. Yes/No
4 Shared blame, no ownership Nobody can be fired for this decision because nobody owns it. Yes/No
5 Initiative punishment People who move without consensus get disciplined or socially penalized. Yes/No
6 Status reports over work More time spent reporting on work than doing work. Detailed updates for approvers. Yes/No
7 Approval chains Trivial decisions require sign-off from multiple levels. Yes/No
8 Vanity metrics Celebrates milestones that don't correlate with customer value. Yes/No
9 Headcount as success Rewards people based on team size, not output quality. Yes/No
10 Downside obsession Every discussion centers on what could go wrong. Risk avoidance over value creation. Yes/No
11 Compliance routing Everything goes through legal, brand, and compliance regardless of materiality. Yes/No
12 Meeting culture Default response to any problem is "let's schedule a meeting" instead of "let's fix it now." Yes/No

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 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. 12d ago First seen · 111 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 4594242bc627

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bureaucracy-detector is a skill published in the GitHub repository sohaibt/founder-mode (3 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 1,468 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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