Circle Of Competence

Circle Of Competence is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by tjboudreaux in cc-thinking-skills.

969 stars133 forkson tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skillsAdded 2026/08/21+1% in starsRepository updated 2026/08/07

agent-skillsai-toolsanthropicclaudeclaude-codecritical-thinkingdecision-makingfirst-principlesmental-modelsproblem-solvingsystems-thinking

Install in seconds

Install Circle Of Competence

Copy Circle Of Competence into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/tree/main/skills/thinking-circle-of-competence ~/.claude/skills/thinking-circle-of-competence

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/thinking-circle-of-competence/SKILL.md in tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/thinking-circle-of-competence
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 2451 skills

What Circle Of Competence does

Circle Of Competence checks whether a claim is grounded before answering. Use it to fetch evidence, mark uncertainty, or abstain when a specific fact is unverified and wrongness would matter.

Circle Of Competence is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Circle Of Competence comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, ai-tools, anthropic, claude and claude-code.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Circle of Competence

Treat competence as an evidence boundary, not self-image. Answer only when grounded; otherwise fetch, mark uncertainty, or abstain. The failure mode is a fluent fabrication treated as fact.

When to Use

About to assert a specific fact (API, path, number, config, version behavior) without a citable source from this session.
The claim is about this codebase or system and you have not read or run the relevant artifact.
Pattern reconstruction would sound complete but is unconfirmed.
Cost of a wrong confident answer is material (security, data, irreversible action, trust).

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Circle Of Competence

What else does tjboudreaux publish alongside Circle Of Competence?
Circle Of Competence is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Bounded Rationality, Effectuation and First Principles. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Circle Of Competence does, and is maintained by tjboudreaux in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills page.
How does Circle Of Competence compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Circle Of Competence ranks #1389 by stars among the 2451 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Circle Of Competence against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.