thinking-reversibility

thinking-reversibility is a skill for Claude Code from tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (728 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision-making method based on how difficult a choice is to undo. Reversible choices can be made quickly, while costly choices are tested or staged before committing.

In plain words
What is it for?
For evaluating technical, product, process, or organisational decisions by identifying the rollback path and the cost of reversing them.
Why use it?
It prevents spending too much time on easy-to-reverse decisions and helps avoid rushing choices that could be expensive or difficult to change.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter.

Part of the cc-thinking-skills plugin — 28 skills shipped together

Good fit For evaluating technical, product, process, or organisational decisions by identifying the rollback path and the cost of reversing them.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility
About the project

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.

tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills · 1,300 stars · on GitHub

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 tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills --skill thinking-reversibility
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cc-thinking-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills.

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 thinking-reversibility

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility/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 thinking-reversibility

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-reversibility.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 728 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 12 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 12 Mar 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 56
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00034 $0.00728
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00364
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00146
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00073

Measured 11d ago against content hash 674f597cbc2f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

thinking-reversibility 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 11d 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/thinking-reversibility/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reversibility

Core rule: match process depth to undo cost. Most decisions are cheaper to reverse than they look; irreversible ones deserve deliberation and staged commitment.

When to Use

  • Uncertain how much analysis a decision deserves (tech, process, product, org)
  • Tempted to committee a low-blast-radius choice, or to rush a high-lock-in one
  • Can redesign the move (pilot, flag, abstraction, time-box) to lower undo cost
  • High-stakes choice where acting vs waiting have asymmetric recovery profiles

When NOT to Use

  • Already classified this session—decide at matched depth; do not re-label forever
  • Trivial two-way calls (names, local refactors) where deciding is cheaper than classifying
  • Externally forced move with no optionality (hard deadline, contract, regulation)
  • Correctness gates (security, data integrity) that need the right answer, not speed theater

Procedure

  1. Name the decision and undo path. State what would be committed and the concrete reverse move (rollback, migrate back, revoke, re-hire, re-contract).
  2. Score reversibility. Assess technical effort, time, money, reputation, dependents, and learning lost if reversed. Classify:
    • Type 2: undo in days, low cost → decide fast
    • Type 1.5: undo in weeks, moderate cost → light structure + monitor
    • Type 1: months or not realistically undoable → deliberate
  3. Asymmetric downside / recovery. For Type 1 or 1.5:
    • Acting wrong: downside, recoverable?, recovery cost
    • Not acting: what permanently closes (window, exclusivity, path lock)
    • Rule: recoverable acting downside + permanent inaction loss → staged commit over indefinite delay; catastrophic or third-party harm → refuse or redesign first
  4. Option-preserving redesign. Prefer pilots, feature flags, interfaces, versioning, time-boxed vendor terms, or strangler slices that convert Type 1 surface into Type 2 experiments. Deliberate only the residual irreversible core.
  5. Match process and commit. Type 2: pick a reasonable option, ship, monitor. Type 1: document assumptions, argue the opposing case, surface to owner if stakes require it. Stop once class and commitment depth are set—do not re-analyze without new undo-cost evidence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 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. 11d ago First seen · 57 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 674f597cbc2f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

thinking-reversibility is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,300 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 728 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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