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-steel-manninggit 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-steel-manning)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-steel-manning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-steel-manning/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-steel-manning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-steel-manning.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 | $0.00718 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00359 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00144 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00072 |
Grade A, and why
thinking-steel-manning 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 — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Steel-Manning
Core rule: Engage the best form of the opposing case, not a weak one. If your position survives that, reaffirm; if not, update.
When to Use
- About to reject a proposal, design, or alternative approach.
- Inclined to agree with the user/plan and risk sycophancy — construct the best case against first.
- Design review, architecture debate, or conflict where trade-offs are real.
- Validating your own preferred decision before locking it (strongest-countercase check).
When NOT to Use
- Settled fact, security anti-pattern, or violated hard requirement — correct it; do not invent a defense of what is wrong.
- You already agree for stated, weighed reasons — do not perform a fake debate.
- Trivial or fully reversible choices where deliberation cost exceeds downside.
- Live emergency — act first; steel-man in the post-incident review.
- Need definition/assumption cleanup, not opposition — use socratic.
- Need failure scenarios for a plan — use pre-mortem; need attacker paths — use red-team.
Procedure
- State the target claim or decision you are about to accept or reject, in one sentence. Name the real alternative if one exists.
- Extract the core insight behind the opposing position (or against your preferred path): the legitimate concern even if the proposed solution is wrong.
- Construct the strongest faithful case an informed advocate would make: best evidence, incentives, and failure modes — no mockery, no cherry-picked weak version, no motive attacks. Include base rates or concrete alternatives that could overturn the preferred path when relevant.
- State agreement / overturn conditions. Write one observation or result that would make you accept the opposing case (or abandon your preferred path), and whether you have looked for it.
- Engage that strong version, then decide. Respond to the steel-manned case on the merits. Output one of: accept opposing path, revise synthesis, or reaffirm original with explicit residual risks. Naming the countercase without accept/revise/reaffirm is incomplete. Stop once the decision updates or is reaffirmed with conditions.
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 · 53 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 89c1401a5336
thinking-steel-manning is a skill published in the GitHub repository tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills (1,306 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 718 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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