groom

groom is a command for coding agents from fockus/skill-memory-bank. It costs 30 tokens per session (1,083 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided conversation for examining a task or idea before, during, or after implementation. It questions whether the work is needed, explores the approach, finds missing details, and records decisions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for a rough idea, an existing specification, a decision worth revisiting, or an open question. Its notes can inform later planning or change decisions already accepted.
Why use it?
Tasks can move forward with unclear goals, overlooked risks, or unresolved choices. This provides a place to challenge the plan and capture the answers for later work.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/groom
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fockus/skill-memory-bank

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for groom

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/groom.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/groom)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/groom"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/fockus/skill-memory-bank/groom.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,083 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00030 $0.01083
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00541
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00217
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00108

Measured 5d ago against content hash a4c2cac5e71d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

groom scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/groom.md · 63 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 63 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/mb groom

Groom a task with the agent before (or during, or after) implementation. Unlike /mb discuss, the goal is NOT to produce a spec — it is to cover the white spots: the agent approaches the requirements critically, challenges the user on whether the thing should be done at all and how exactly, proposes its own solutions, gives advice, and asks follow-up questions.

Usable at any stage: a raw idea, a task that already has a spec, a decision worth revisiting, or any open question. The resulting context and decisions then feed spec planning (/mb sdd) or change already-accepted decisions.

Difference from /mb discuss

/mb discuss /mb groom
Goal EARS-validated requirements → context/<topic>.md, status: ready for /mb sdd//mb plan Cover white spots, challenge the task, record decisions
Output Requirements document Dialogue summary + decisions routed into agreements/backlog
EARS enforcement Yes No
Fixed phases 5 phases + size triage + transcript contracts Free-form, driven by white spots

Alias note: /mb ask_me is an alias for /mb discuss, not for groom.

Workflow

Pre-flight

  1. Resolve MB_PATH = .memory-bank/. Refuse if missing (suggest /mb init).
  2. GROOM_FILE = $MB_PATH/context/<topic>-groom.md (same folder as /mb discuss output).
  3. Read existing artifacts first — groom against reality, not from scratch: context/<topic>.md, specs/<topic>/, matching plans/*.md, agreements.md, backlog.md entries mentioning the topic (best-effort, skip missing).

Research (before the first question)

Same evidence discipline as /mb discuss Phase 0, lighter: codebase recon (code graph / mb-semantic-search.py / grep, cite file:line), prior decisions (/mb recall <topic>, agreements.md, notes/). Recommendations must cite evidence; a recommendation without a citation is a guess — say so.

Grooming dialogue

Reuse the grilling rules from commands/discuss.md (recommend-first, one question per turn, concrete scenarios, surface contradictions with code, decision ledger), plus the grooming-specific stance:

Read the full file on GitHub · 63 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 63 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A a4c2cac5e71d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

groom is a command published in the GitHub repository fockus/skill-memory-bank (25 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 1,083 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.