mlevison/agent-thinking-skills

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

Skill	What it's for
Systems Thinking	Problems that keep coming back. Traces causes upstream, finds the feedback loops holding a situation in place, and draws Causal Loop Diagrams when the picture would help.
Critical Thinking	Claims, conclusions and decisions that need testing before you act. Paul and Elder's eight Elements of Reasoning and nine Intellectual Standards, asked as questions - starting from wherever your thinking already is.
Critical Thinking for GenAI	Text a model produced, where walking the author back through the reasoning doesn't work because there was no route. Eleven probes that test the output instead of asking the author.

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 all three
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 all three at once and keeps them current through /plugin update.

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

The first line registers the catalogue and installs nothing. The second does the installing. agile-pain-relief is the marketplace name rather than the repository name, so the two deliberately differ.

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

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. 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/
  marketplace.json  # the catalogue /plugin marketplace add reads
  plugin.json       # this repo as a single plugin
skills/
  <skill-name>/
    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

• 2026-08-26 - 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 is used to help me desgin the skills themselves and write the installation instructions. The core content remains human authored. To the extent that Mark Levison remains human.

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