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-second-ordergit 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-second-order)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-second-order"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-second-order/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-second-order"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-second-order.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 | $0.00031 | $0.00674 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00337 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00135 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00067 |
Grade A, and why
thinking-second-order 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 — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Second-Order Consequence Chains
Do not stop at the intended first effect. Trace what happens next across actors, time, and feedback until the chain stops changing the decision.
When to Use
- Strategic, policy, incentive, or architecture choices with lasting coupling.
- The obvious fix feels too easy or has known backfire patterns.
- Success or scale would create new problems (load, gaming, debt).
- Need to compare options by delayed effects, not only day-one benefit.
When NOT to Use
- Local reversible edit with no incentive or cross-component coupling—just ship and observe.
- Full system structure (stocks, many loops, leverage ranking) is the goal—use systems.
- Pre-mortem of failure modes for a plan already chosen—use pre-mortem.
- Pure mechanical changes (rename, format) with no behavioral effect.
Procedure
- State decision and first-order effect. One sentence each: action and intended immediate result.
- Chain "and then what?" At least two further orders. For each link record: effect, who responds, rough probability (high/med/low), timing (immediate / next cycle / at scale), and whether it feeds back into the original problem (reinforce or counteract).
- Expand affected parties. Who else reacts (users, operators, other teams, attackers, markets)? What incentives does the change create or destroy?
- Scale test. Ask what happens if everyone does this or usage grows 10x. Mark paths that only appear under scale or repetition.
- Prune and decide. Drop speculative links that do not change the choice. Keep only effects that alter go/no-go, design, or mitigations. Revise the action or add guards where second-order harm exceeds first-order gain.
Stop when further "and then what?" no longer changes the decision, or the remaining chain is pure speculation without mechanism.
Output
decision: <action>
first_order: <intended immediate effect>
chain:
- order: 2
effect: <what>
actors: <who>
p: high|med|low
when: immediate|next_cycle|at_scale
feedback: none|reinforce|balance
- order: 3
...
scale_if_universal: <one sentence or n/a>
revised_decision: <same | modified action | no-go>
mitigations: <guards for kept risks>
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 · 59 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A bd1fe2b01aa5
thinking-second-order is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,293 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 674 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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