thinkfu

ThinkFu

Metacognition as a service. A catalog of thinking moves for AI agents -and the humans working alongside them.

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What is ThinkFu?

ThinkFu is a curated catalog of thinking moves -strategic, creative, and analytical techniques that help unstick problems, reframe challenges, and generate novel approaches. Think of it as a martial arts manual for cognitive work: a set of named, practiced moves you can reach for when you're stuck, looping, or just need a jolt.

Inspired by:

• TRIZ -the Soviet-era systematic innovation methodology that distilled 40 inventive principles from thousands of patents
• Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies -a deck of disorienting prompts designed to break creative deadlock
• Design Thinking, Lateral Thinking, Systems Thinking -and other structured reasoning traditions

ThinkFu does what those do, but is built for three audiences simultaneously: AI agents (via MCP), developers (via REST API), and humans (via the website... and maybe one day an app or a move deck).

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The Problem

AI agents -like humans -have two failure modes:

1. They get stuck. They loop, overfit to their current framing, miss adjacent approaches. They know they're stuck - but don't know what to do about it.

2. They don't know they should be stuck. They confidently produce the first workable solution - the cliché, the default, the most-probable-token-sequence answer. They satisfice when they should explore. They never question whether their approach is the obvious one everyone would reach for.

Problem 1 is an impasse. Problem 2 is the Einstellung effect - the tendency to apply a familiar method even when a better one exists. For AI agents, this is structural: they are trained to produce the most likely completion. Without deliberate intervention, "most likely" is all you get.

There's currently no standard, reusable, queryable library of thinking moves that agents or humans can reach for -not just when stuck, but as a regular practice to elevate the quality of their thinking.

ThinkFu is that library. It provides metacognition as a service: the ability to think about how you're thinking, to notice when you're on autopilot, and to deliberately shift your cognitive approach.

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Architecture

One Cloudflare Worker serves three interfaces from the same catalog:

                    ┌─────────────┐
                    │   Catalog   │
                    │  (YAML/MD)  │
                    └──────┬──────┘
                           │
                    ┌──────▼──────┐
                    │  Cloudflare │
                    │   Worker    │
                    └──┬───┬───┬──┘
                       │   │   │
              ┌────────┘   │   └────────┐
              ▼            ▼            ▼
         MCP Server    REST API      Website
        (AI agents)   (developers)  (humans)

1. The Catalog

A manually curated library of thinking moves. Each move is a structured move (see Move Format below). The catalog is the foundation -everything else builds on it.

Sources drawn from:

• TRIZ's inventive principles
• Oblique Strategies
• Design Thinking
• Lateral thinking (de Bono)
• Systems thinking (Meadows, Senge)
• Metacognition research (Flavell, Schraw)
• Classical philosophy, improv theater, Zen, cognitive science, and more (see credits)

2. The REST API

The canonical interface. Both the MCP server and website are thin layers on top of it.

GET /random

Returns a random ThinkFu move.

Optional query params:

• category -filter by category
• format -json (default), md, html

GET /move/:id

Returns a specific move by ID (e.g., /move/TF-001).

Optional query params:

• format -json (default), md, html

POST /suggest

The smart route. Surfaces the most relevant move based on context and metacognitive mode.

{
  "mode": "plan | explore | stuck | evaluate",
  "goal": "What are you trying to achieve?",
  "current_approach": "What's your current approach or solution?",
  "stuck_on": "Where specifically are you stuck? (optional, for stuck mode)",
  "context": "Any additional free-form context (optional)",
  "exclude": ["TF-001", "TF-003"],
  "style": "matched | random"
}

The mode field maps to metacognitive phases (see Theoretical Foundations):

• plan -before starting: challenge your default approach, consider alternatives
• explore -during work: broaden the search space, escape the obvious path
• stuck -at an impasse: break through a block
• evaluate -after drafting a solution: stress-test it, check for cliché

The exclude array lists move IDs already tried in this session. The server will not return these.