alternatives-explore

A method for exploring several genuinely different ways to solve a product, workflow, or system problem. It ends with one recommended, small experiment rather than a final design or implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want a bold, contrarian, experimental, or non-incremental alternative, then need a limited experiment with a measurable success signal.
Why use it?
It helps avoid settling too quickly on a small variation of the current approach. Each option is compared for usefulness, feasibility, reversibility, and ease of testing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/yarlson/yarstack/alternatives-explore
Any agent
npx skills add yarlson/yarstack --skill alternatives-explore
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yarlson/yarstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 254 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 $0.00047 $0.00254
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00127
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00051
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00025

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5d9f13274d4d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alternatives-explore 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 2d 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.

plugins/yarstack/skills/alternatives-explore/SKILL.md · 21 lines

What it actually says

Alternative Ideation

Recommend one useful abstraction shift and a bounded experiment without turning ideation into architecture or implementation.

Workflow

  1. State the core problem, current assumptions, constraints, and outcome that must remain valuable.
  2. Generate several materially different bets by changing ownership, workflow, abstraction, distribution, architecture, or a supposedly necessary component.
  3. Evaluate each bet for user value, distinctness, feasibility, reversibility, and testability.
  4. Select the strongest bet and explain which default assumption it rejects, why that matters, and where it could fail.
  5. Define the smallest experiment with bounded cost and a falsifiable success signal.

Do not produce cosmetic variants, settle final architecture, research unresolved technical facts, write an implementation plan, or implement the experiment. Use architecture-refine for architectural convergence, technical-spike for blocking technical evidence, and plan-create for implementation planning.

Finish after recommending one experiment and its success signal. A recommendation does not authorize implementation.

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. 2d ago First seen · 21 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 5d9f13274d4d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alternatives-explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository yarlson/yarstack (3 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 254 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 2026-08-31.

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