thinking-skills

Claude Code Thinking Skills

39 Mental Models and Critical-Thinking Frameworks for Claude Code

Claude Code Thinking Skills is a collection of 39 mental-model and critical-thinking frameworks for Claude Code that give Anthropic's AI coding agent structured ways to reason about decisions, debugging, systems, risk, and strategy. Each skill packages a proven thinking framework — from first-principles reasoning to the theory of constraints — into a Claude Code skill you can invoke by name, and the whole collection is backed by a transparent, replication-gated evaluation pipeline.

TL;DR — At a Glance

What it is	A library of 39 mental-model and critical-thinking skills for Claude Code.
Who it's for	Engineers, founders, and analysts who want Claude Code to reason with structured frameworks instead of ad-hoc heuristics.
How to start	Install via the plugin marketplace, then invoke thinking-model-router to be routed to the right skill.
License	MIT — free to use, modify, and distribute.
Evidence	Every skill ran through a replication-gated Elevate-or-Kill evaluation pipeline. The honest headline: zero skills currently hold a robust, replicated ELEVATE verdict — and we publish that result rather than hide it.
Entry point	thinking-model-router → START HERE

Table of Contents

• Why This Project Is Different
• Features
• Quick Start
• Available Skills
• How the Skills Were Evaluated
• Quality Assurance Tools
• Detailed Skill Descriptions
• FAQ
• Contributing
• Keywords
• Related Resources
• License
• Author

Why This Project Is Different

Most "AI prompt pack" repositories claim their content makes models smarter and never test the claim. This project did the opposite: it built an objective, length-controlled, replication-gated evaluation harness and ran all 39 skills through it. The result is documented openly, including the inconvenient finding that no skill yet meets the bar for a proven, replicated accuracy gain.

That rigor is the point. These skills are useful structured-reasoning scaffolds grounded in established frameworks, and the evaluation methodology is honest enough to tell you exactly how strong the evidence is. Transparency over hype is the standard here.

Features

• 39 Thinking Frameworks — A curated library of mental models for decision-making, debugging, and strategy.
• Eval-Backed and Honest — Built and tested with a rigorous, replication-gated evaluation pipeline; see the Elevate-or-Kill Scorecard.
• Battle-Tested Foundations — Grounded in frameworks from cognitive science, systems thinking, and strategic analysis (Munger, Meadows, Kahneman, Goldratt, Altshuller/TRIZ, Boyd/OODA).
• Claude Code Native — Designed specifically for Claude Code's skill system and invocation model.
• Quality Scripts — Tooling to validate, score, and improve skill quality.
• Zero Configuration — Install and invoke skills by name; no setup required.

Quick Start

Installation via Plugin Marketplace (Recommended)

Install directly in Claude Code using the plugin system:

# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills

# Install the plugin
/plugin install thinking-skills@thinking-skills-marketplace

Alternative: Manual Installation

Clone and copy skills directly:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills.git

# Copy skills to your global Claude Code config
cp -r cc-thinking-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

# Or copy to a specific project
cp -r cc-thinking-skills/skills/* /path/to/your/project/.claude/skills/

Development: Load as Local Plugin