mece

mece is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from tupe12334/instinct. It costs 26 tokens per session (1,772 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A way to organize analysis into categories that do not overlap and together cover the full topic. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to divide problems, research questions, team responsibilities, or presentations into distinct categories with no intended gaps.
Why use it?
It prevents duplicated responsibility, missing cases, and confusing issue trees or communication structures.

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/mece
Any agent
npx skills add tupe12334/instinct --skill mece
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 mece

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/mece.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/mece)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tupe12334/instinct/mece"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tupe12334/instinct/mece.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 26 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,772 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 $0.00026 $0.01772
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00886
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00354
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00177

Measured 4d ago against content hash 072c75e202c1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mece 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 4d 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/mece/SKILL.md · 141 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 141 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive)

Overview

MECE is a structuring principle from McKinsey used to break a problem or topic into categories that do not overlap (mutually exclusive) and together cover every possibility (collectively exhaustive). Apply it to issue trees, slide structures, research questions, and team responsibilities.

Topic: "Why are sales falling?"

BAD (overlaps + gaps)          GOOD (MECE)
┌──────────────────┐           ┌──────────────────────┐
│ Marketing issues │           │ Volume (fewer deals) │
│ Bad marketing    │  ← overlap│ Price (lower ASP)    │← no overlap
│ Low pipeline     │           │ Mix (cheaper SKUs)   │
│ Economy          │  ← gap:   └──────────────────────┘
│                  │  product? Revenue = Volume × Price × Mix
└──────────────────┘           covers all levers — no gaps

Core Concepts

Mutually Exclusive

Each item belongs to exactly one bucket. No item can logically fit in two categories at the same time. If two items can both claim the same fact, they overlap.

Collectively Exhaustive

The full set of items covers every possible case. No valid instance of the topic is left uncategorized. Ask: "Is there any scenario that falls outside all my buckets?" If yes — you have a gap.

Issue Tree

The main tool for applying MECE: a hierarchical breakdown where every level is MECE relative to its parent. Each node splits into children that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive of that node.

Root question
├── Branch A (MECE siblings at level 1)
│   ├── A1 (MECE siblings at level 2)
│   └── A2
├── Branch B
│   ├── B1
│   └── B2
└── Branch C

How to Apply

Step 1 — State the root question precisely

Write the single question your structure must answer. Vague roots produce vague trees. "What should we do about revenue?" is weak; "Why did Q3 revenue miss forecast by 15%?" is sharp.

Step 2 — Choose a splitting logic

Pick one consistent dimension to split on at each level. Common logics:

  • Mathematical identity: Revenue = Volume × Price × Mix
  • Process/timeline: Discover → Evaluate → Purchase → Retain
  • Organizational: By business unit, geography, or customer segment
  • Causal: Internal vs. External; Supply vs. Demand

Read the full file on GitHub · 141 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. 4d ago First seen · 141 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 072c75e202c1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mece is a skill published in the GitHub repository tupe12334/instinct (1 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 1,772 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.

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