analytical-thinking

analytical-thinking is a skill for Claude Code from ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills. It costs 110 tokens per session (759 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for analysing a question by breaking it into parts, testing possible explanations, examining evidence, and stating uncertainty.

In plain words
What is it for?
Defining questions and measures, organizing evidence, comparing options, forming hypotheses, and summarizing findings with confidence levels.
Why use it?
It gives complex problems a clear order of work and makes the reasoning behind conclusions easier to check.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ai-agent-skills plugin — 10 skills shipped together

Good fit Defining questions and measures, organizing evidence, comparing options, forming hypotheses, and summarizing findings with confidence levels.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking
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 ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills --skill analytical-thinking
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

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 analytical-thinking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for analytical-thinking

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills/analytical-thinking.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 110 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 759 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.
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 $0.00110 $0.00759
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00380
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00152
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00076

Measured 10d ago against content hash 9b88043f1d75, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

analytical-thinking 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 10d 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/analytical-thinking/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analytical Thinking

Clarity beats cleverness. End with answers tied to structure and stated confidence.

How to run it with this skill: one clearly headed section per step in this order: Frame → Decompose → Hypotheses → Evidence → Synthesis. Insert Options matrix only when Setup calls for it (after Evidence, before Synthesis).


Setup (run before starting)

In one short block:

  1. Analytical question — precise, ideally falsifiable
  2. Default pass — Frame → Decompose → Hypotheses → Evidence → Synthesis (state this line)

If data availability or definitions are missing, ask at most 3 questions in one message, then proceed. Note any remaining gaps or working guesses in plain language (no bracket tags in Setup).

If the user is choosing among concrete alternatives, after Evidence insert Options matrix: rows = options, columns = criteria (state weights if any), qualitative scores (− / 0 / +) with one-line justification per cell — then finish with Synthesis.


The Steps

Frame

Question type (estimate, compare, explain, predict, optimize). Unit of analysis and baseline (even if hypothetical).

Decompose

Tree or table: factors, drivers, or workstreams. Each child node should be MECE-ish (mutually exclusive where it matters; collectively exhaustive enough for the decision).

Hypotheses

Ranked H1, H2, H3 — what would we expect to observe if each were true? What would falsify each?

Evidence

For each hypothesis: Observation: … — Strength note: one short sentence on how much this observation supports or undermines the hypothesis and the main limit (no Strong/Moderate/Weak labels). Caveat:

If no real data, run a thought experiment section instead — label bullets [THEORETICAL].

Synthesis

  1. Answer — direct response to the analytical question
  2. Key uncertainty — what single unknown swings the answer most
  3. Next data / step — what to collect or run next

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 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. 10d ago First seen · 83 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A 9b88043f1d75

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analytical-thinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository ysskrishna/ai-agent-skills (8 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 759 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.