inversion

inversion is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tupe12334/instinct. It costs 27 tokens per session (2,275 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A problem-solving method that looks at a goal backwards: identify what would cause failure, then avoid those causes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review plans, products, processes, or decisions by asking how they could fail and what safeguards to add.
Why use it?
It reveals risks and blind spots that forward planning can miss. Removing obstacles can be easier than adding more effort.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the instinct plugin — 54 skills, 1 hook shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tupe12334/instinct/inversion
Any agent
npx skills add tupe12334/instinct --skill inversion
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tupe12334/instinct

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install instinct, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 54 skills, 1 hook.

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 inversion

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/inversion.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/inversion)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/inversion"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/inversion.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,275 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00027 $0.02275
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.01137
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00455
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00228

Measured 3d ago against content hash 578f80b98eb1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

inversion 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 3d 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/inversion/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Inversion

Overview

Inversion is a mental model popularized by Charlie Munger and rooted in the mathematics of Jakob Jacobi: instead of asking "how do I achieve X?" ask "what would guarantee I never achieve X?" then systematically avoid those things. Removing obstacles is often faster than adding effort — the answer to a hard forward problem is frequently obvious once you look at it from the other end.

FORWARD THINKING          INVERTED THINKING
─────────────────         ──────────────────────────────────
"How do we build          "How would we guarantee users
 a loyal user base?"   ←  never come back?"
                                 │
                          - Ignore support tickets
                          - Ship confusing UX
                          - Break things without notice
                                 │
                          INVERT the list:
                          → Respond fast, fix UX, communicate changes

Inversion does not replace forward planning — it stress-tests it and fills in blind spots that optimism and familiarity hide.

Core Concepts

The Inversion Flip

Every goal statement has a mirror. "Maximize customer trust" inverts to "destroy customer trust." The mirrored question is psychologically easier to answer because humans are wired to spot threats and failures more readily than they are to generate novel paths to success.

Obstacle Removal vs. Goal Pursuit

Two routes to any outcome:

  • Add things that produce it (the standard approach).
  • Remove things that prevent it (inversion's contribution).

Munger's formulation: "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there."

Completeness Check

Inversion is a completeness tool. Apply it after forward brainstorming to catch what you missed — the goal is not to replace positive plans but to find the failures your forward plan silently assumes away.

┌───────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ FORWARD QUESTION  │ INVERTED MIRROR                           │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ How do we grow    │ How would we reliably kill revenue?        │
│ revenue?          │                                           │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ How do we ship    │ How would we guarantee this launch fails?  │
│ this on time?     │                                           │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ How do we build   │ What would make top performers leave       │
│ a great team?     │ within six months?                        │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ How do we make    │ What would make this decision obviously    │
│ the right call?   │ the wrong one in hindsight?               │
└───────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┘

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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. 3d ago First seen · 158 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 578f80b98eb1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

inversion is a skill published in the GitHub repository tupe12334/instinct (1 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 2,275 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-31.