Agent Thinking Skills

A collection of Agent/Claude Skills to help you think, instead of having your thinking taken from you by GenAI.

These skills are designed to give you agency back. They ask questions, one at a time, and use your answers to decide what to ask next.

In addition, these skills are intended to flag potential weaknesses that are inherent in all GenAI, such as sycophancy and verification errors.

The Skills

What To Ask

Systems Thinking - causes upstream, consequences downstream State the problem, or the plan

• We solved this problem last quarter and it keeps coming back
• Everyone sees a different cause for the same problem
• We’re considering bonuses for resolving client calls within five minutes
• In three years we expect GenAI to do most of the work

For more detail see: Systems Thinking

Critical Thinking - testing human reasoning and its implications State the claim, or the decision

• Adding another step in the review process will reduce the number of defects
• I’ve decided to take a new job
• My co-worker is getting under my skin and raising the problem will just make it worse
• We selected a new supplier in ten minutes with no objections

Critical Thinking for GenAI - testing output that has no human reasoning Share what the model generated

• It quoted a statistic without a source
• It summarised a sensitive meeting and agreed with claims people made in it
• I asked two different LLMs and they agreed
• It reviewed the contract and said “no flags”

Evaporating Cloud - conflicts that end in compromise State the two options, or the argument

• Promote the new CEO from within, or hire from outside
• Every planning session ends in the same fight over features versus technical debt
• Part of me wants to save for a trip, part of me wants to eat out more
• Two teams each need the same specialist full-time

Roadmap

• Cynefin - complexity/uncertainty classification, as an additional framework within Systems Thinking.
• Glossary - domain vocabulary for the terms used across the skills, each linking to the APR glossary or a blog post for depth. For people reading the repo, not loaded at runtime.

A Note on Language

These skills never have the model refer to itself as a person. It asks you to “provide an example”, not to “give me an example”. It doesn’t say “I think” or “let me draw that”.

Using personal pronouns with GenAI models leads to errors where we falsely attribute human thinking to the model. A model that speaks as “I” invites you to treat it as a colleague who has weighed the evidence and formed a view. It hasn’t, and it hasn’t. The moment you forget that, you stop checking its work, which is the one thing these skills exist to keep you doing.

The same rule governs the instructions inside each SKILL.md. They say what the assistant should do rather than addressing it as “you”, so nothing in the text implies there is someone in there being spoken to.

Installing a Skill

Three routes. The first two update themselves; the third doesn’t.

npx skills

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and around thirty other agents. The registry is skills.sh; this repository is the package.

npx skills add mlevison/agent-thinking-skills                       # asks where to put them, offers every skill
npx skills add mlevison/agent-thinking-skills -g                    # personal, so every project has them
npx skills add mlevison/agent-thinking-skills -s critical-thinking  # one skill only
npx skills update                                                   # pull later versions

The CLI reports anonymous install counts by default; DO_NOT_TRACK=1 turns that off.

Claude Code plugin

Installs every skill at once and keeps them current through /plugin update.

/plugin marketplace add mlevison/agile-pain-relief-skills
/plugin install thinking-skills@agile-pain-relief-skills

The first line registers the catalogue and installs nothing. The second does the installing. agile-pain-relief-skills is one marketplace for all of Agile Pain Relief’s skills, so the same catalogue also offers Refactoring Skills — add it once, install whichever plugins you want.

To remove: /plugin uninstall thinking-skills@agile-pain-relief-skills.

This repository used to be its own marketplace. If you installed that way, /plugin uninstall thinking-skills@agile-pain-relief and /plugin marketplace remove agile-pain-relief first.

By hand

Each skill is a self-contained directory under skills/. Copy the whole thing, references/ and all, or the skill won’t load:

• Claude Code (project) - into .claude/skills/, committed
• Claude Code (personal) - into ~/.claude/skills/, for every project
• Claude apps - zip the directory and upload it

Symlinking a clone instead of copying makes git pull the update: ln -s "$PWD/skills/critical-thinking" ~/.claude/skills/critical-thinking.

Anthropic’s guide: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512180-using-skills-in-claude

Invoking a Skill

Two ways, and you get both by default:

• Type the slash command - /critical-thinking, /systems-thinking, /critical-thinking-genai, /evaporating-cloud. In Claude Code a skill directory named x creates /x, so the directory name is the command.
• Say something that matches - each skill lists its trigger phrases, and Claude reaches for the skill when one turns up.

Installed as a plugin, each skill also answers to a namespaced command, /thinking-skills:critical-thinking, which is what to type if something else on the machine has already claimed the short name.

Repository Layout

.claude-plugin/
  plugin.json       # this repo as a single plugin; the catalogue that
                    # lists it is github.com/mlevison/agile-pain-relief-skills
skills/
  /
    SKILL.md        # frontmatter + workflow; what Claude loads
    README.md       # the human-facing explanation
    references/     # frameworks and detail, loaded on demand

SKILL.md stays short on purpose. Anything long lives in references/ so it’s only read when it’s actually needed.

Updates

• 2026-10-07 - Added the Evaporating Cloud skill.
• 2026-09-15 - New install command: the plugin is now listed in the shared agile-pain-relief-skills marketplace.
• 2026-08-26 - Split Critical Thinking for GenAI out of Critical Thinking into a skill you can invoke on its own.
• 2026-08-24 - Added the Critical Thinking skill. Renamed and restructured the repo from “systems-thinking” to “agent-thinking-skills” to allow for more skills.

GenAI Usage

Claude helps me design the skills, drafts each SKILL.md and its references/, and wrote the installation instructions. The READMEs, the explanations written for people, are human authored. To the extent that Mark Levison remains human.

Contributing

Issues first, please, for ideas every bit as much as for bugs. It’s the cheapest place to find out whether something fits, and it saves you writing a patch that was never going to land.

The wording here is fussed over to a degree that is probably unreasonable, down to the pronouns. Changing a skill’s text changes how the skill behaves, so it’s worth a conversation before anyone spends an evening on it.

Pull requests written by an agent won’t be merged. A model helped draft plenty of what’s here, so that’s a fair thing to raise: the difference is that every line was argued with, cut and rewritten by someone who has to live with the result.

The irony that this is the longest stretch of generated text in the repository has been noted.

License

CC BY-SA 4.0 - full text in LICENSE.

Copy, adapt and build on these skills, commercially or otherwise. Two conditions: keep the attribution, and put the same licence on what you build.

That holds for derivative work assembled by a GenAI agent from these files exactly as it holds for work assembled by hand. The obligation sits with whoever directed the agent. Keep this line:

Mark Levison, Agile Pain Relief - github.com/mlevison/agent-thinking-skills

ATTRIBUTION.md says the same thing in a form an agent can parse.

Created by Agile Pain Relief