foundations-theory-of-constraints

foundations-theory-of-constraints is a skill for Codex from vasilyu1983/AI-Agents-public. It costs 38 tokens per session (6,270 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of methods for finding and managing the main bottleneck that limits a system's total output.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to sequence work around a constraint, allocate limited capacity, balance work with a bottleneck, and reassess whether the constraint moved after an improvement.
Why use it?
It helps teams focus improvement work on the step that actually holds back a delivery pipeline, roadmap, funnel, or other process.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it to sequence work around a constraint, allocate limited capacity, balance work with a bottleneck, and reassess whether the constraint moved after an improvement.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vasilyu1983/ai-agents-public/foundations-theory-of-constraints
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.

Any agent
npx skills add vasilyu1983/AI-Agents-public --skill foundations-theory-of-constraints
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vasilyu1983/AI-Agents-public

Made for: Codex.

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 foundations-theory-of-constraints

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vasilyu1983/ai-agents-public/foundations-theory-of-constraints/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vasilyu1983/ai-agents-public/foundations-theory-of-constraints)
Your own site
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Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,270 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium analysis-evasion · line 1
    Suspicious Unicode normalization or mixed-script content
    Fix: Review the flagged content for security risks. Ensure no credentials, secrets, or sensitive data are exposed.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00038 $0.06270
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.03135
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.01254
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00627

Measured 9d ago against content hash a4330567de42, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

foundations-theory-of-constraints 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 9d 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.

frameworks/shared-skills/skills/foundations-theory-of-constraints/SKILL.md · 279 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 279 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Theory of Constraints Foundations

11 canonical Theory of Constraints primitives for diagnosing and exploiting system constraints. Primitives are domain-agnostic: the same Five Focusing Steps that fix a production line apply to a software delivery pipeline, a product roadmap, or a consulting engagement. Each primitive solves a specific class of throughput-limiting problem.

When to Apply

Apply theory-of-constraints when:

  • One bottleneck demonstrably gates total system throughput (the system has a constraint, not many)
  • Roadmap or capacity-allocation under a hard limited resource (eng-weeks, GPU-hours, account-managers)
  • Funnel debug where a single step blocks downstream conversion
  • Policy constraint suspected (a rule, not a physical limit, is what's holding throughput)
  • Subordination question — "should other steps slow down to match the bottleneck?"
  • Post-AI adoption reassessment — when AI coding tools improve individual velocity but delivery metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate) stay flat, re-run 5FS; the constraint has likely shifted downstream to code review, verification, or integration (DORA 2025, n≈5,000; corroborated by IT Revolution 2026 and Logilica 2025)
  • LLM / agent-pipeline optimization — when end-to-end latency or task throughput of a multi-step AI pipeline is not meeting targets despite adding models or workers; the constraint is usually a specific stage (LLM decode, serialized tool execution, or a guardrail/eval step), not aggregate capacity — profile per stage before scaling

Skip and use simpler alternatives when:

  • System has multiple roughly equal bottlenecks — TOC's "elevate one" model misfires; use queueing networks (foundations-queueing-theory)
  • Throughput question is really a feedback-control question (oscillation, instability) — use foundations-control-theory
  • The "constraint" is actually a strategic choice (we want this to be the limit) — TOC is a diagnostic, not a strategy
  • Bottleneck moves run-to-run (no stable system) — stabilise before applying 5 focusing steps
  • T/CU ratio differences are < 20% across initiatives — ranking noise dominates the signal
  • Pure capacity addition is cheap and uncontroversial — just add capacity; TOC analysis is overhead

Read the full file on GitHub · 279 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. 9d ago First seen · 279 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A a4330567de42

Subscribe to this mod's changes

foundations-theory-of-constraints is a skill published in the GitHub repository vasilyu1983/AI-Agents-public (87 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 6,270 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 2026-09-03.

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