An evidence-graded library of agent-executable thinking-method skills.
Every method is reduced to its working mechanism, graded honestly on how strong its evidence actually is, and shipped as a skill that produces a concrete artifact, not prose.
What it is Β Β·Β Install Β Β·Β Frameworks Β Β·Β Evidence Β Β·Β Recipes Β Β·Β Live site
Table of Contents
AI agents are fluent and fast, and surprisingly weak at the moves that make thinking actually good: reframing a problem before solving the wrong one, separating evidence from inference, imagining how a plan fails before it does, stress-testing a decision from more than one angle. Humans are not much better under time pressure. Both converge too early.
thinking-framework-skills packages the durable core of the structured-thinking tradition (decision science, creativity research, systems thinking, foresight, critical thinking) as small, composable, agent-ready skills. Each one helps a person or an agent reframe a problem, generate options, challenge an assumption, trace a consequence, or stress-test a decision, and hands back a usable artifact.
Three things make it different from a list of mental models:
| It is | It is not |
|---|---|
| Mechanism-first - the durable cognitive move, named for what it does | A museum of trademarked frameworks |
| Evidence-graded - an honest tier (S/M/P/V/A/C/X) on every skill, including "weaker than people think" | A confident claim that every method is "proven" |
| Artifact-producing - a risk register, an option matrix, an argument map, a Thinking Plan | A set of vibes-y prompts |
| Composable - skills chain into recipes, passing a compressed artifact at each step | A pile of unrelated one-offs |
| Honest about misuse - every skill names where it misleads ("when NOT to use this") | A cargo-cult checklist |
Relationship to pm-skills: sibling library, no technical coupling. thinking-framework-skills helps decide what to work on and why it is sound; pm-skills helps execute how. They compose; neither depends on the other.
Claude Code (recommended):
/plugin marketplace add product-on-purpose/agent-plugins
/plugin install thinking-framework-skills@product-on-purposeAll 56 frameworks (plus the 4 tools and 9 recipes) become available immediately, invocable by name (for example /think-premortem).
Cross-agent (Cursor, Copilot, Cline, and others via the open skills CLI):
npx skills add product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skillsClone or download:
git clone https://github.com/product-on-purpose/thinking-framework-skills.gitYour first run. Pick a real decision you are about to commit to, then:
/think-premortem "we're about to launch a free tier to drive signups"You get a ranked risk register: for each top risk, a leading signal, a mitigation, an owner, and a kill criterion. That artifact, not a feeling of caution, is the point. You do not need an agent - every skill is a procedure you can run by hand with the template on its page.
Not sure which framework you need? Start with the Framework Advisor: describe your situation in plain language and it returns a prioritized Thinking Plan of which skills to run, in order, and what to skip. It is the front door to everything else.
π Full walkthrough:
docs/getting-started.mdΒ· Explore the whole library: the live site.
The field of "thinking methods" has three uneven layers: a small empirical core with replicated study evidence, a large practitioner ring of long-standing heuristics with real traction but limited formal validation, and a noisy outer ring where popularity and weak evidence get conflated. Most libraries flatten all three into one shiny catalog.
This one does the opposite, and that honesty is the product:
- Grade evidence transparently. Every skill carries a tier, and its dossier states what the research does and does not show. A practitioner-tier method labeled honestly is more trustworthy than one dressed up as science.
- Do not launder statistics. The often-cited "premortems surface ~30% more reasons" measures the number of reasons, not a 30% gain in decision quality. Claims are scoped to what the studies actually measured.
- Mechanism over ritual. The skill implements the durable move and names the branded ritual as lineage, never the reverse. (So the library ships Parallel Perspectives Review, not the trademarked Six Thinking Hats.)
- Flag transferred evidence. Almost no studies test an AI agent running these methods. Where evidence comes from human-subject research, the page says so.
56 frameworks across 12 cognitive-operation families, arranged as a thinking lifecycle. (Four tools and nine recipes ride on top.) You rarely run all twelve; the Framework Advisor picks the few that fit your situation.
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PF["1. Problem Framing (5) - frame the real problem"]:::frame
DI["2. Divergent Ideation (6) - generate options"]:::gen
PM["3. Perspective & Multi-Lens (2) - see it from other angles"]:::gen
SC["4. Systems & Consequences (8) - trace consequences"]:::analyze
AB["5. Assumption & Belief Challenge (4) - challenge assumptions"]:::analyze
RC["6. Reasoning Clarity (5) - clarify the reasoning"]:::analyze
DO["7. Decision & Option Evaluation (10) - decide between options"]:::decide
SO["8. Strategy & Opportunity (1) - test strategy against alternative futures"]:::decide
EV["9. Ethics & Values Deliberation (3) - weigh the moral trade-off"]:::decide
RR["10. Risk & Resilience (4) - anticipate what could go wrong"]:::decide
SY["11. Synthesis (4) - turn inputs into a message"]:::reflect
MR["12. Meta-Thinking & Reflection (4) - learn and route"]:::reflect
PF --> DI --> PM --> SC --> AB --> RC --> DO --> SO --> EV --> RR --> SY --> MR
In text: frame the problem, generate options, see it from other angles, trace consequences, challenge assumptions, clarify the reasoning, decide between options, test strategy against alternative futures, weigh the moral trade-off, anticipate what could go wrong, synthesize, then reflect. See the full color-coded map (by evidence tier) on the live site.
Honest grading is the differentiator, so the key comes before the catalog: every skill and every claim is labeled with one of seven tiers, from strongest to weakest.
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
S |
Strong - replicated experimental or meta-analytic support |
M |
Moderate - real evidence, but narrower, correlational, or field-based |
P |
Practitioner - widely used and defensible, without strong controlled evidence |
V |
Vendor - originates from a consultancy or branded methodology |
A |
Anecdotal - case reports and testimonials |
C |
Conceptual - reasonable, not yet demonstrated |
X |
Poor/contradictory - the evidence cuts against it (excluded, documented) |
A few skills carry a split grade (for example M/P or S/M): the mechanism rests on one tier while a specific claim about it rests on another. Where a grade leans on human-subject research that has not been tested on an AI agent, the skill's dossier flags that transfer explicitly rather than overclaiming.
A strong-evidence core anchors the library; everything else is honestly labeled around it. The bibliography aggregates the graded sources so a skeptic can trace any claim to its grounding. See docs/concepts.md for the short version.
All 56 frameworks, by family. The Tier column is the evidence grade defined just above. Each name links to its full page - mechanism, numbered procedure, worked example, and graded sources - on the live site. (The routers and applicators are listed under Tools; the chains under Recipes.)
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Problem Restatement | M/P |
Rewrite the problem several ways to expose hidden framing, then pick a more useful one |
| Abstraction Laddering | P |
Move up ("why") and down ("how") the ladder to find the altitude where the problem is workable |
| Contradiction Resolution | M/P |
Reframe a trade-off as a contradiction to dissolve via separation in time / space / scale / condition, with an honest exit when it is genuinely real |
| Boundary Critique | C/P |
Audit the boundary judgments behind a frame (who benefits, decides, counts, has standing) in is vs ought, naming who is affected but excluded |
| Frame Creation | C/P |
Distil themes and the core paradox, then abduce a new "as if it were Y" standpoint and reason forward to solutions |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Morphological Analysis | P |
Lay out a solution's independent parameters and their possible values as a Zwicky box, then cross-combine and prune to internally consistent configurations |
| Brainwriting | S |
Silent, parallel, written idea generation that reliably outperforms verbal brainstorming |
| Far-Analogy Ideation | S |
Transfer solutions from distant domains, which produce more original ideas than near ones |
| SCAMPER | P |
Run an idea through seven transformation prompts to force structured variation |
| Question Burst | P |
Generate a rapid burst of questions, rank them, and pursue the most catalytic one |
| Assumption Reversal | P |
Surface the assumptions baked into a problem, negate them, and generate non-obvious reframes |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Role-Storming | P |
Generate ideas while inhabiting a chosen non-self persona, using the assumed identity to lower self-censorship and shift associations |
| Parallel Perspectives Review | P |
Examine a decision through several separated lenses in turn, then synthesize a balanced read |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Three Horizons | C |
Hold three time-horizon curves at once - declining present, contested transition, emerging future - and locate the actor in the transition zone |
| Process Tracing | P |
Test rival causal explanations of a single case by each piece of evidence's diagnosticity (hoop, smoking-gun, straw-in-the-wind, doubly-decisive tests) |
| Causal Layered Analysis | C |
Read an issue down four layers (litany, system, worldview, myth) and reconstruct a preferred future back up each, anchored by a deliberately changed metaphor |
| Stocks and Flows Reasoning | S |
Reason explicitly about accumulations and rates, which people systematically misjudge |
| Causal Loop Diagrams | M/P |
Close and sign the feedback loops (reinforcing or balancing) to read why a system spirals, settles, or oscillates |
| Futures Wheel | P |
Map first-, second-, and third-order consequences radiating from a change |
| Iceberg Model | P |
Move from events down to the patterns, structures, and mental models that produce them |
| Theory of Constraints | P |
Find the single binding constraint capping throughput and attach its exploit / subordinate / elevate decisions (the five focusing steps) |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Authentic Dissent | S |
Cultivate genuine minority disagreement, which improves reasoning where role-played dissent does not |
| Consider the Unknowns | M |
Before committing to a judgment, explicitly list the relevant variables you cannot observe and weigh the gap they leave |
| Ladder of Inference Check | P |
Trace how you climbed from raw data to conclusion to catch where interpretation crept in |
| Red Team Light | P |
A lightweight adversarial pass that attacks a plan to surface its weak points |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Argument Mapping | S |
Diagram the structure of claims, reasons, and objections to expose where it is weak |
| Argumentation Schemes | P |
Identify which stereotyped argument pattern is in play, then test it with that scheme's standard critical questions |
| Natural-Frequency Bayesian Framing | S |
Express probabilities as natural frequencies (3 in 1,000) to make conditional reasoning tractable |
| Evidence vs Inference Sort | P |
Separate what is actually known from what is being inferred, and label each |
| Issue Tree | P |
Decompose a question into a logical tree of sub-questions to make analysis tractable |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Pairwise Comparison | P |
Rank options with no absolute scale by judging every pair head-to-head, deriving the order from the win-counts with a consistency check |
| Dialectical Bootstrapping | M |
Make an estimate, assume it is wrong and list why, estimate again from those changed assumptions, then average the two numbers |
| Interest-Based Negotiation | P |
Separate interests from positions, decide against your BATNA inside the mapped ZOPA, and invent options for mutual gain before dividing value |
| Minimax Regret | P |
Choose under deep uncertainty with no probabilities by minimizing the worst-case regret across the states of nature |
| Linear-Model Aggregation | S |
Score options on a simple weighted model that tends to beat holistic judgment |
| Fermi Estimation | M/P |
Estimate an unknown by decomposing it into order-of-magnitude factors, then multiplying back to a number with a low/high band |
| What Would Have to Be True | P |
Turn a claim into the specific conditions that must hold, then test them |
| Decision Option Review | P |
Compare options against weighted criteria with explicit tradeoffs |
| One-Way vs Two-Way Door | P |
Classify a decision by reversibility and match the deliberation cost to it |
| Expected-Value Decision Tree | P |
Price the uncertainty: a tree of choice and chance nodes, rolled back to an expected value per option, with a what-flips-it note |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Scenario Planning | P |
Construct a set of divergent, internally consistent external futures (2x2 critical-uncertainty axes), then robustness-test strategy across them |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning | M |
Decide a values trade-off as if you had an equal chance of being any affected party, then return to the actual decision and confront the gap |
| Ethical Matrix | P |
Grid affected parties (including voiceless ones) against prima facie principles (wellbeing, autonomy, fairness) and read the cell-level pattern of trade-offs |
| Speculative Harms & Anti-Goals | A |
Assume the design succeeds at scale, narrate how it harms third parties and is exploited in bad faith, then convert each harm into an explicit anti-goal |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Premortem | S/M |
Imagine the plan has already failed and work backward to causes, tripwires, and kill criteria |
| Reference Class Forecasting | S |
Estimate from the track record of similar past projects, not inside-view optimism |
| WOOP | S |
Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan: mental contrasting plus implementation intentions |
| Backcasting | P |
Start from a desired future state and work backward to the steps to reach it |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Contradiction / Tension Mapping | C |
Map an interdependent polarity as a both/and - two poles, their upsides and downsides, a greater purpose, warning signs, and action steps - to manage rather than resolve it |
| Concept Mapping | M/P |
Build a labeled-relationship concept network so each link reads as an explicit proposition, surfacing gaps and missing links |
| Affinity Mapping | P |
Cluster many raw notes into emergent themes from the bottom up |
| Pyramid Principle | P |
Structure communication as a governing claim over grouped, ordered support |
| Skill | Tier | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| After Action Review | S |
Structured review of expected vs actual, and what to change, to improve the next loop |
| Interval Calibration Check | P |
Test a stated confidence interval against an equivalent bet, widen until indifferent, then score stated confidence against the actual hit rate |
| Decision Journal | P |
Record the decision, rationale, and prediction now to calibrate your judgment later |
| Belief-Update Routine | P |
Re-score a standing inventory of open beliefs against new evidence on a cadence, with an explicit confidence delta and an under-updating guard |
Browse them five other ways - by job, by evidence, by artifact, by situation, or on the map - in the site's Explore section. The skills themselves live in
skills/.
Four skills are tools, not thinking methods: they operate over the library - routing you to the right framework, applying several at once, or researching new ones. They carry no evidence tier of their own (any grade in a tool's dossier is about the tool's behavior, not a method), and they live under /tools/ on the site.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Framework Advisor | Router, the front door. Describe a situation, get a prioritized Thinking Plan of which frameworks to run, in order, and what to skip. Use it when you do not know which method fits. |
| Top-3 | Applicator. Rank the most relevant frameworks for your topic, apply the top three so each emits its artifact, then cross-synthesize. Use it when you want worked output now, not a plan. |
| Random Frameworks | Applicator. Draw three frameworks at random and apply each regardless of fit, to break a frozen or fixated framing. Use it when the obvious lenses are not working. |
| Research Framework | Engine. Research a candidate method, grade its evidence conservatively, and propose a catalog entry for review. This is how the library grows; it never auto-admits. |
Frameworks, tools, and recipes, in one line: a framework is a single graded thinking method (the 56 in the catalog above); a tool helps you choose or apply frameworks (the 4 here); a recipe is a fixed chain of frameworks for a recurring job (the 9 below).
Each skill is a self-contained unit: a portable SKILL.md (the mechanism and procedure), an evidence/dossier.md (the graded sources and honest caveats), a references/EXAMPLE.md (a worked example that sets the quality bar), and a skill.meta.yml sidecar (governance, taxonomy, relationships).
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U["You<br/>a messy situation"]:::you
S["A think- skill<br/>mechanism + procedure"]:::skill
A["A concrete artifact<br/>risk register, option matrix,<br/>argument map, Thinking Plan"]:::art
U -- invoke --> S -- produces --> A
When you run /think-premortem "...", the agent loads the skill, follows its numbered procedure, mirrors the worked example, and produces the artifact. No prompt engineering required. The docs site is a generated view of these files; see docs/architecture.md for how the skills become the site.
Recipes chain several skills into one end-to-end job, passing a compressed artifact at each handoff. Nine ship today:
| Recipe | What it does |
|---|---|
| Kepner-Tregoe | Find a deviation's cause, choose among defined options, and de-risk the rollout - the rational-process bundle run as a chain of shipped moves |
| PDCA / A3 | Root-cause a performance gap, choose and run a countermeasure, then review actual versus expected and standardize or iterate |
| Reframe a problem | Restate the problem, sharpen the question, and check the framing before you build |
| Expand options | Reframe, then generate genuinely new options before judging any |
| Stress-test a decision | Surface what must be true, weigh options, calibrate reversibility, and premortem the plan |
| Audit reasoning | Separate evidence from inference, map the argument, and pressure-test it |
| First principles | Decompose a problem to its fundamentals, then strip the inherited assumptions to rebuild from what is necessary |
| Idea-quality audit | Score a batch of ideas on explicit quality dimensions, then pressure-test the strongest few before committing |
| Issue-Position-Argument mapping | Turn a tangled multi-question deliberation or transcript into a typed map - the open issues, the rival positions on each, and the arguments for and against |
Browse them on the live site or in _workflows/.
| If you want to... | Start here |
|---|---|
| Get unstuck or decide, now | The Framework Advisor - describe your situation, get a plan |
| Browse by the job you need done | Explore by job |
| See only the strong-evidence methods | Explore by evidence |
| Filter by your situation, live | The interactive chooser |
| Learn good thinking, beginner to advanced | The learning tracks |
| Check the claims | The evidence and bibliography |
| Build with or extend the library | docs/ and docs/contributing.md |
- Live site - the full, searchable, interactive experience (per-framework pages, learning tracks, explorers, the bibliography). This is the home for using the library.
docs/- the repo-browser and contributor layer: architecture, concepts, contributing, conformance, the authoring loop, and the release process.skills/- the frameworks themselves (the source of truth the site renders).
This plugin is built to the agent-skills-toolkit Advanced Skill Library Standard, which grades a skill library on three tiers. Each tier includes everything below it:
| Tier | Name | What it certifies |
|---|---|---|
| π₯ | Advanced (Gold) | The plugin proves itself - it ships CI that runs the Standard's own validators against it and passes (self-hosting), generates its INDEX.md and native manifests from a single authored source, and maintains release notes and a deprecation policy. |
| π₯ | Convergent (Silver) | The plugin declares its agent targets and emits each higher-order component (commands, workflows, chain contracts) correctly for both Claude Code and Codex, with a manifest that matches what is on disk. |
| π₯ | Universal (Bronze) | The skills are portable - valid frontmatter, an AGENTS.md, a manifest, references one level deep - so the identical files run on any agentskills.io-compatible agent. |
thinking-framework-skills validates at advanced (Gold) with 0 errors and 0 warnings against the pinned toolkit. Concretely, it earns Gold through:
- Self-hosting CI that passes. Every pull request runs
scripts/check.mjs(the Standard's validators) via.github/workflows/ci.yml, andcheckis a required status check onmain. The same one command reproduces the result locally. - Generated INDEX and manifests.
INDEX.md,.claude-plugin/plugin.json, the Codex manifest, andmanifest.generated.jsonare all generated from the authoredlibrary.jsonand drift-checked; a hand-edit is a CI error. - Curated release notes.
RELEASE-NOTES.mdis maintained separately from the technicalCHANGELOG.md. - Deprecation policy and all Bronze and Silver requirements, by inclusion.
Two Gold checks are not applicable here, and the library says so rather than papering over it: hook documentation and chain/hook eval coverage apply only to plugins that ship hooks or chained components. This library ships neither - its recipes are workflow chains of independent skills, not runtime chain contracts - so those checks pass vacuously. Every skill still carries its own eval/cases.md.
Full breakdown, check by check:
docs/conformance.md. The Standard itself: agent-skills-toolkit / STANDARD.md.
v0.9.0 - public and growing. The library grows additively, and evidence grades are refreshed as the research does. User-facing highlights live in RELEASE-NOTES.md; the full technical history is in CHANGELOG.md.
| Current version | v0.9.0 |
| Frameworks | 56, across 12 cognitive-operation families |
| Tools | 4 meta-skills (a router, two applicators, the research engine) |
| Recipes | 9 (skill chains shipped as workflow components) |
| Conformance | advanced (Gold) - 0 errors / 0 warnings, self-hosting CI |
| Evidence | 11 skills at S / S-M tier; every skill graded and sourced |
| Spec | agentskills.io |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Docs site | thinking-framework-skills.productonpurpose.com |
| Install | /plugin install thinking-framework-skills@product-on-purpose |
thinking-framework-skills/
βββ skills/ # 56 frameworks + 4 tools (the source of truth)
βββ frameworks/ # registry.mjs (the catalog) + per-method dossiers
β βββ think-<method>/ # SKILL.md, evidence/dossier.md, references/, eval/cases.md, skill.meta.yml
βββ _workflows/ # Recipe definitions (multi-skill chains) as workflow components
βββ recipes/ # Human-readable recipe write-ups
βββ scripts/ # gen-site, gen-manifest, gen-recommendable, and the check.mjs gate
βββ site/ # Astro Starlight docs site (a generated view of skills/)
βββ docs/ # Contributor and build docs
β βββ internal/ # AUTHORING.md, specs/, release-plans/, research/
βββ .github/workflows/ # CI: the self-hosting conformance gate + Pages deploy
βββ library.json # Authored manifest (the canonical component index)
βββ INDEX.md # Generated catalog index (drift-checked)
βββ CHANGELOG.md # Technical version history
βββ RELEASE-NOTES.md # Curated, user-facing release highlights
βββ AGENTS.md # Universal agent-discovery file
| Path | What's in it |
|---|---|
skills/ |
All 56 frameworks + 4 tools, each a self-contained unit (the site renders from these) |
frameworks/ |
registry.mjs (the single-source-of-truth catalog of 135 evaluated methods) + per-method dossiers |
_workflows/ |
The 9 recipes as workflow components - ordered skill chains with handoffs |
scripts/ |
Generators (site, manifests, name-safety set) and check.mjs, the conformance gate |
docs/ |
Getting started, architecture, concepts, contributing, conformance |
docs/internal/ |
The authoring loop, specs, release plans, and research |
Full detail in CHANGELOG.md; curated highlights in RELEASE-NOTES.md.
Release history
| Version | Highlights |
|---|---|
| 0.9.0 | Discoverable by agents: a generated, drift-gated llms.txt index plus catalog.json (the 69 invokable skills/tools/recipes with routing and chaining fields) and evaluated.json (all 135 graded methods) at the site root, so other agents can find and route to the library; bundles the post-v0.8.0 measurement loop and example-coverage ratchet. No new skills; catalog stays 56. |
| 0.8.0 | Learn by example: a Showcase of 16 real decisions worked prompt-to-artifact (a founder, an engineer, a policy analyst), an operating guide, a prompt gallery, and a "Does this actually work?" page publishing the behavioral-eval numbers (99% routing with 0 false-fires; 99% of output checks). Documentation and trust; catalog unchanged at 56. |
| 0.7.1 | Framework Library complete: every documented-not-shipped method now has a published dossier (45 -> 75), documenting settled verdicts with honest sourced research. Documentation-only patch; no catalog count change. |
| 0.7.0 | Behavioral evals land (routing: 99% top-1, 0 false-fires; artifact quality: 99% checks pass); the four flagged skills tightened by construction; catalog grows 47 -> 56 with a new Ethics & Values Deliberation family (9 Build / 7 Fold / 1 Recipe / 13 Reject from 30 candidates). |
| 0.6.0 | Catalog grows 40 -> 47 with 7 survivors of a 26-candidate research sweep; AGENTS.md roster tables generated and drift-checked; published Framework Library grows 8 -> 25 dossiers. |
| 0.5.0 | Catalog grows 37 -> 40 (Theory of Constraints, Expected-Value Decision Tree, Scenario Planning); 7-candidate shortlist fully reconciled; Strategy & Opportunity family intro added. |
| 0.4.0 | The Framework Library platform: registry as single source of truth with strong CI, the research-framework engine, Top-3 and Random-Frameworks applicators, published Framework Library dossiers, a /tools/ section separating meta-skills from graded frameworks, and the advisor's calibrated routing gate. |
| 0.3.0 | The advisor-credibility milestone: behavioral eval cases enforced in CI, and advisor corpus enrichment (anti-triggers, when-not, overlaps). Plus the Belief-Update Routine framework and an idea-quality-audit recipe. |
| 0.2.0 | Catalog grows 31 to 34; Gold-tier hardening with a self-hosting conformance gate in CI, a generated INDEX.md, and RELEASE-NOTES.md. Tier declared advanced. |
| 0.1.0 | First public release: 31 evidence-graded, agent-executable skills + 4 composable recipes, validating at convergent (Silver). The think-framework-advisor front-door router. A full Astro Starlight docs site. Listed in the Product on Purpose marketplace. |
Contributions, ideas, and framework proposals are welcome. The bar is deliberately high - it is what keeps the library trustworthy.
A new framework must clear the selection bar. It has to:
- Add a distinct, durable cognitive move - not duplicate one already shipped. The overlap ceiling is real: candidates that reduce to an existing skill are rejected or become recipes.
- Carry an honest evidence grade with a dossier of graded sources, including what the research does not show.
- Produce a concrete artifact, not prose.
- State when not to use it.
To propose or build one:
- Open an issue describing the move and its evidence - the fastest way to get feedback before you build.
- Read
docs/contributing.mdand the per-skill authoring loop indocs/internal/AUTHORING.md. - Mirror an existing skill's 5-file structure (
SKILL.md,evidence/dossier.md,references/,eval/cases.md,skill.meta.yml). - Run the conformance gate locally (
node scripts/check.mjs) before opening a PR; CI runs the same gate.
Diagrams follow the pm-skills utility-mermaid-diagrams house style. Commit with Conventional Commits.
Distributed under the Apache License 2.0. In short: you may use this library commercially, modify and redistribute it, use it privately, and include it in proprietary software. The only requirements are attribution and including the license notice.
On method names and trademarks. Names that are trademarks or carry specific licenses remain the property of their owners. This library implements the underlying cognitive mechanisms, names them descriptively, and notes lineage and attribution in each skill's references rather than claiming the brands.
Built and maintained by Jonathan Prisant (@jprisant), a product leader who thinks in systems and gets unreasonably excited about understanding and solving problems. thinking-framework-skills is the reasoning sibling to pm-skills: one helps you decide what to work on and why it is sound, the other helps you execute how.
If this library has sharpened a decision, or saved you from a bad one, consider starring the repo and sharing it with your team.
Built with purpose by Product on Purpose
Evidence-graded thinking, packaged as skills your agent can actually run