OODA Loop

OODA Loop 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 OODA Loop

Copy OODA Loop 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-ooda ~/.claude/skills/thinking-ooda

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

What OODA Loop does

OODA Loop helps you make reversible decisions under time pressure by cycling Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act at about 70% confidence. Use it for incidents, intermittent failures, or other changing situations where fast re-observation matters.

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

Documentation

README

Excerpt

OODA Loop

Core rule: For reversible moves under time pressure, act on ~70% confidence, then immediately re-observe. Cycle faster than the situation compounds; a late perfect plan loses to a fast loop.

When to Use

Incident response, outage, or ongoing degradation where state is still moving.
Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, live traffic shift).
Any time-bounded decision where waiting for full certainty costs more than a reversible action.

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

Frequently asked about OODA Loop

What else does tjboudreaux publish alongside OODA Loop?
OODA Loop is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Bounded Rationality, Circle Of Competence and Effectuation. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way OODA Loop 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 OODA Loop compare to other AI Engineering skills?
OODA Loop ranks #1400 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 OODA Loop against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.