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-socraticgit 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-socratic)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-socratic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-socratic/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-socratic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-socratic.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 | $0.00780 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00390 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00156 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00078 |
Grade A, and why
thinking-socratic 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.
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.
Socratic Questioning
Core rule: Surface the load-bearing assumption or undefined term before you build. Ask only what you cannot resolve yourself; stop when the next action is decision-ready.
When to Use
- Request is underspecified ("make it fast", "add a dashboard", "fix the bug") and a guess would misbuild.
- Claim rests on an unstated assumption that may be the real problem.
- Someone treats a premise as "obvious" or jumps to a solution before the problem is defined.
- Debugging a vague symptom that needs a checkable specific before investigation.
When NOT to Use
- Spec is already clear and actionable — do the work; do not interrogate for theater.
- Ambiguity is resolvable by reading code, running a command, or checking docs — resolve it yourself.
- Mid-execution of an agreed plan — re-questioning every step is friction, not rigor.
- Emergency where one load-bearing fact is enough to act — clarify that fact, then act (prefer ooda).
- You need the strongest opposing case, not clarification — use steel-manning.
- You need causal chain depth on a defined failure — use five-whys-plus or scientific-method.
Procedure
- Name the gap. State what is undefined, assumed, or uncheckable. If you can fill it from tools/repo without the user, do that and stop.
- Ask the load-bearing question first. Prefer one question whose answer most changes what you will build. Categories (use only what the gap needs):
- Clarification — "What does X mean / for whom / success looks like?"
- Assumption — "What must be true? What if it is false?"
- Evidence — "What supports this? What would disprove it?"
- Perspective — "Who is affected / who would disagree?"
- Implication — "What follows if we do this?"
- Meta — "Is this the right question?"
- Resolve or branch. From the answer, either (a) write the clarified requirement/decision and proceed, or (b) ask at most one follow-up that still gates the work. Do not run all six categories by default.
- Make assumptions explicit. Restate: "This assumes X; success means Y; out of scope is Z." Confirm only if still ambiguous after your restatement.
- Stop at decision-ready clarity. When the next action no longer depends on a hidden premise, end questioning and act or hand off. Cap user-facing questions tightly; prefer batching the few that truly gate work.
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.
- 11d ago First seen · 59 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 64a510f0b7ad
thinking-socratic 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 780 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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