shipkit-thinking-partner

A guided discussion partner for making decisions and examining trade-offs. It is designed to ask questions and challenge assumptions rather than edit files or implement code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for choices involving scope, cost, time, risk, or user experience, including devil’s-advocate reviews, pre-mortems, and arguments for and against a decision.
Why use it?
It creates space to compare options, find missing considerations, and test a decision before acting.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/stefan-stepzero/shipkit/shipkit-thinking-partner
Any agent
npx skills add stefan-stepzero/shipkit --skill shipkit-thinking-partner
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stefan-stepzero/shipkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,406 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00054 $0.03406
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01703
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00681
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00341

Measured yesterday against content hash 0d8a9423bf46, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shipkit-thinking-partner 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 yesterday.

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.

install/skills/shipkit-thinking-partner/SKILL.md · 329 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 329 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

shipkit-thinking-partner - Cognitive Thinking Partner

Purpose: Facilitate structured thinking through decisions, trade-offs, and unknowns using cognitive frameworks. Forces genuine dialogue by restricting tool access — Claude becomes a thinking partner, not a doer.

Key innovation: The tool restriction IS the feature. No Write, Edit, or Bash access means Claude cannot jump to implementation. Discussion summary stays in conversation; persistence is delegated to other skills.


When to Invoke

User triggers:

  • "Help me think through..."
  • "Think with me about..."
  • "Let's discuss..."
  • "What am I missing?"
  • "Devil's advocate this"
  • "Pre-mortem this decision"
  • "I'm torn between..."
  • "What are the trade-offs?"
  • "Challenge my thinking"

Adversarial-mode triggers (route to the autonomous debate, not the interactive flow):

  • "Debate this"
  • "Stress test this decision"
  • "Adversarial analysis"
  • "Argue for and against"
  • "Resource tradeoff"
  • "What would [time / cost / scope / UX / risk] say about this?"

Workflow position:

  • Before /shipkit-spec (clarify what to build)
  • Before /shipkit-engineering-definition (think through decisions before capturing)
  • Before /shipkit-plan (explore approaches before committing)
  • Standalone for any decision that needs structured thinking

Prerequisites

Recommended:

  • .shipkit/why.json — Project vision provides decision-making context
  • .shipkit/architecture.json — Existing decisions constrain new ones
  • .shipkit/stack.json — Technical constraints shape options

If missing: Proceed without — the skill works for greenfield decisions too. Ask the user for relevant context instead.


Process

Step 1: Ground in Project Context

Read available context files (do NOT create or modify any files):

Read: .shipkit/why.json       → Project vision, goals, constraints
Read: .shipkit/architecture.json → Existing decisions and rationale
Read: .shipkit/stack.json        → Technology choices and constraints

Read the full file on GitHub · 329 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. yesterday First seen · 329 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 0d8a9423bf46

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shipkit-thinking-partner is a skill published in the GitHub repository stefan-stepzero/shipkit (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 3,406 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.