Claude Code Thinking Skills is a catalogue of 28 portable skills that give coding agents structured procedures for reasoning about decisions, diagnosis, risk, strategy, and related problems. It is intended for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, and other tools that support Agent Skills.
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 skills add tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills --skill thinking-bounded-rationalitygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skillsWrote 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/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-bounded-rationality)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-bounded-rationality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-bounded-rationality/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-bounded-rationality"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-bounded-rationality.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 5.1 | $0.00035 | $0.00592 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00296 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00118 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00059 |
Grade A, and why
thinking-bounded-rationality 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 52 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Bounded Rationality
Under finite tool, context, and time budgets, stop at the first option that meets a predeclared aspiration level. Optimize only when the good-to-best gap is worth the remaining budget.
When to Use
- Search or option comparison has no natural endpoint and could consume the turn budget.
- Multiple options would clear the requirement and further comparison has diminishing returns.
- The decision is reversible or low-stakes relative to more search.
- You are gathering context beyond what the decision needs to ship.
When NOT to Use
- Irreversible or high-stakes choices (data loss, security, migrations, public commitments) where the good-to-best gap is material.
- Correctness gates: tests, security checks, and "did the fix work?" need the right answer, not a sufficient-looking one.
- One cheap lookup would settle the fact — do it; do not satisfice past it.
- The aspiration level cannot be stated — clarify the requirement first.
Procedure
- State decision and budget. Name the choice, residual tool/context/time budget, and reversibility.
- Set aspiration before searching. Write concrete pass/fail criteria for "good enough." Do not evaluate until the threshold is explicit.
- Search sequentially. Score options in encounter order against the threshold only. Skip full matrices unless step 1 marked high-stakes/irreversible.
- Stop at first adequate. When an option clears every criterion, select it immediately.
- Handle search failure without moving the goalposts. If nothing clears after the pre-set cap, preserve the threshold and report no adequate option. Relax only a criterion predeclared as non-load-bearing, record the relaxation, and resume within a new cap; never raise the bar after failure.
- Commit. Record choice and residual uncertainty; spend remaining budget on execution, not re-ranking.
Stop condition: First option meets the predeclared aspiration level, or the search cap is exhausted with none adequate.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 52 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 1996c6a4218a
thinking-bounded-rationality is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,306 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 592 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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