Mindframe
Thinking framework skills for Claude Code and other AI agents.
What's Inside
| Skill | Description | Details |
|---|
| Animal Magic | Seven animal-based thinking frameworks for brainstorming, analysis, planning, and creative problem-solving | skills/animal-magic/SKILL.md |
| Dinner Party | Assemble history's greatest thinkers to debate your ideas — 40 guests tagged by locale, era, domain, and thinking style | skills/dinner-party/SKILL.md |
| Cognitive Flex | Exercise your reasoning before the AI answers — a cognitive fitness coach that prompts you to think first | skills/cognitive-flex/SKILL.md |
Animal Magic Quick Reference
| Animal | Mode | Best For |
|---|
| Rabbit | Multiply Ideas | Brainstorming, content ideation |
| Owl | Deep Analysis | Risk assessment, root cause analysis |
| Ant | Small Steps | Project planning, task breakdown |
| Dolphin | Creative Solutions | Innovation, lateral thinking |
| Eagle | Big Picture | Strategic planning, architecture |
| Beaver | Practical Systems | System design, workflows |
| Elephant | Cross-Disciplinary | Analogies, interdisciplinary insight |
Installation
Claude Code plugin (recommended)
/install github.com/louisgillies/mindframe
npm
npm install -g mindframe
Manual
Clone the repo and copy the skills into your Claude skills directory:
git clone https://github.com/louisgillies/mindframe.git
cp -r mindframe/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/
Dinner Party Quick Reference
40 thinkers tagged across 5 dimensions for dynamic table assembly:
| Dimension | Examples |
|---|
| Locale | british, scottish, french, italian, american, indian, chinese, japanese, kenyan, nigerian, colombian, mexican... |
| Era | ancient, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, victorian, modern |
| Domain | science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, engineering, art, literature, economics, medicine, computing... |
| Thinking | systems, reductionist, creative, pragmatic, empirical, humanist, abstract, first-principles... |
| Energy | visionary, skeptic, provocateur, mediator, observer, pioneer, builder, strategist, connector |
"Dinner party: should I quit my job to start a company?"
"Get the British scientists to debate whether AI will replace programmers"
"Renaissance dinner party about modern social media"
"Full dinner on the future of education — use the Scottish Enlightenment table"
Cognitive Flex Quick Reference
| Step | What Happens |
|---|
| Detect & Prompt | Claude identifies question type and asks you to think first |
| You Respond | Articulate your reasoning, instinct, or "I have no idea" |
| Answer + Flex Report | Full answer plus feedback on your thinking |
| Optional Deeper Flex | Explore interesting angles you raised |
Question types: opinion/judgment, analysis/debugging, strategy/design, decision-making
Bypass: say "just answer", "skip", or "no flex" to get the answer immediately
"Should I use a monorepo or separate repos for my microservices?"
"What's the best way to handle authentication?"
"Why is my deployment pipeline so slow?"
Usage
Invoke any animal mode by describing how you want to think:
"Think like a rabbit and give me 10 variations on this headline"
"Analyze this proposal like an owl -- what are the hidden risks?"
"Break this project down like an ant into the smallest possible steps"
You can also let the skill auto-select the best animal for your request -- just describe what you need and the framework picks the right mode. For complex problems, ask for multi-animal analysis to run several lenses in sequence (e.g. Eagle for big-picture strategy, then Ant for actionable steps).
Custom GPTs
ChatGPT GPT versions are available for each skill:
Website
https://louisgillies.github.io/mindframe
Adding a New Framework
- Create
skills/<name>/SKILL.md with frontmatter containing name and description fields.
- Optionally create
gpt/<name>/ with instructions.md and setup-guide.md for a ChatGPT GPT version.
- The plugin auto-discovers new skills in the
skills/ directory -- no other config needed.
Attribution
The Animal Magic framework is inspired by Amanda Caswell's article on Tom's Guide.
License
MIT
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