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-effectuationgit 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-effectuation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-effectuation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-effectuation/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-effectuation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-effectuation.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 | $0.00034 | $0.00826 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00413 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00165 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00083 |
Grade A, and why
thinking-effectuation 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Effectuation
Under Knightian uncertainty, start from available means and affordable loss—not a fixed goal and predicted return. Create the path through controllable action and real commitments.
When to Use
- The market, technology, or problem is novel enough that outcome probabilities are not trustworthy.
- Means are clearer than the goal: identity, skills, assets, and network exist before a fixed target does.
- A small action can buy information or a partner commitment without risking ruin.
- Plans keep breaking because the environment shifts faster than forecasts.
When NOT to Use
- The path is predictable: known market, knowable unit economics, established playbook → use causal planning.
- A single wrong step is ruinous or irreversible → de-risk first; do not treat affordable-loss steps as free.
- The goal is already fixed and resources are the only uncertainty → plan to the goal.
- Routine execution with settled requirements → act; do not re-inventory means.
Procedure
- Inventory means only. List who you are (skills, constraints, values), what you know (domain, tools, data), and who you know (reachable partners, users, resources). Reject "what would be needed for an ideal plan" as input.
- Cap affordable loss. State the maximum time, money, reputation, and opportunity cost you can lose and still continue. If the proposed step exceeds any cap, redesign the step smaller or stop.
- Choose one controllable next action. Prefer the smallest action that can yield either (a) a real commitment from someone else or (b) discriminating information. Act inside the loss cap; do not optimize expected return.
- Seek commitments, not opinions. Share the working means-based offer. Anyone who commits resources, access, or work becomes a co-creator and may reshape the goal. Discard non-committing feedback as non-binding.
- Leverage contingencies. Treat surprises as new means: failed hires, competitor moves, off-roadmap requests. Ask "how can this expand control?" not "how do we restore the old plan?"
- Update means and goal, then stop or loop. Fold new means and commitments into the inventory; restate the emerging goal. Stop when a viable path is controlled enough to execute, the loss cap is exhausted without traction, or uncertainty collapses into a predictable plan (then switch to causal planning).
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.
- 10d ago First seen · 53 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 21d597c896c7
thinking-effectuation is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,293 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 826 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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