board-pause

A command that temporarily turns off passive capture of findings during the current session. Passive capture is the automatic recording of possible lessons or observations while you work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want a quiet session with no finding-extractor calls or scratch-board writes. A separate resume command turns capture back on.
Why use it?
It keeps planning, drafting, or brainstorming sessions from adding unwanted material to the scratch board.

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/ghostlygawd/engineering-board/board-pause
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GhostlyGawd/engineering-board
Per session 41 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,020 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 $0.00041 $0.01020
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00510
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00204
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00102

Measured yesterday against content hash e73e4806ba53, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

board-pause 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 yesterday.

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/board-pause.md · 86 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 86 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/board-pause: suspend passive listening

Pause the engineering-board passive listener for the current session. While paused, the Stop hook short-circuits with <<EB-PASSIVE-PAUSED>> and does NOT invoke the finding-extractor subagent or write to the scratch board. Use this when you want a quiet session for planning, drafting, or brainstorming without capture overhead.

What to do

You are writing a small JSON state file that the Stop hook reads. Be precise about path and shape.

Step 1: Resolve paths

  • State directory: ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.engineering-board/
  • State file: ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.engineering-board/session-mode.json

Create the state directory if it does not exist (mkdir -p semantics).

Step 2: Run the mode-transition guard

Delegate the refusal-matrix decision to the deterministic guard (single source of truth for ARCHITECTURE.md §11.5):

bash "$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/hooks/scripts/board-mode-guard.sh" paused

Inspect the exit code:

  • 0 (ALLOW): parse the guard's stdout. It emits key=value lines including PREVIOUS_MODE=<pm|worker|null> and PREVIOUS_DISCIPLINE=<tdd|review|validate|null>. Use these values in Step 4 below. Then continue to Step 3.
  • 2 (NOOP): print the guard's stdout verbatim and stop. The canonical message for this branch is Engineering board: already paused. No action taken.

/board-pause has no REFUSE branch: every non-paused state allows the transition. The matrix in ARCHITECTURE.md §11.5 lists /board-pause as the in-session escape hatch.

Step 3: Determine current session_id

Read ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.engineering-board/last-stop-stdin.json if it exists and extract the session_id field. If that file does not exist or has no session_id, use an empty string "".

Step 4: Write the paused state

Write ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/.engineering-board/session-mode.json with content:

{
  "mode": "paused",
  "previous_mode": "<PREVIOUS_MODE from the guard's stdout; JSON null if null>",
  "previous_discipline": "<PREVIOUS_DISCIPLINE from the guard's stdout; JSON null if null>",
  "paused_at": "<ISO-8601 now, UTC, e.g. 2026-05-11T14:32:07Z>",
  "session_id": "<value from step 3>"
}

Read the full file on GitHub · 86 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. yesterday First seen · 86 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A e73e4806ba53

Subscribe to this mod's changes

board-pause is a command published in the GitHub repository GhostlyGawd/engineering-board (0 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,020 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 2026-08-31.