pm-start

pm-start is a command for coding agents from GhostlyGawd/engineering-board. It costs 45 tokens per session (1,217 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command that marks the current coding-agent session as a project-manager session for the engineering board. The board is a shared record of project bugs, features, questions, observations, and lessons.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for a long-running session dedicated to collecting scratch findings, organizing them, updating the board, and curating lessons.
Why use it?
It makes later session stops follow the board's consolidation process instead of treating the session as ordinary coding work.

Command

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the engineering-board plugin — 6 skills, 21 commands, 8 agents, 4 hooks, 1 MCP server, 1 plugin shipped together

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/pm-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GhostlyGawd/engineering-board

Or install engineering-board, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 21 commands, 8 agents, 4 hooks, 1 MCP server, 1 plugin.

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 pm-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ghostlygawd/engineering-board/pm-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/ghostlygawd/engineering-board/pm-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/ghostlygawd/engineering-board/pm-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/ghostlygawd/engineering-board/pm-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,217 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 $0.00045 $0.01217
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00609
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00243
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00122

Measured 3d ago against content hash e8e4ecc18b18, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pm-start 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 3d 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/pm-start.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/pm-start: start PM mode

Mark the current session as the engineering-board PM session. While session-mode=pm, the Stop hook runs the PM continuation procedure: the passive extractor plus the full consolidator + tidier + learnings-curator dispatch chain. Use this to designate a long-running session whose job is consolidating scratch into the live board.

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" pm

Inspect the exit code:

  • 0 (ALLOW): continue to Step 3. The guard's stdout contains CURRENT_MODE=null (only null reaches here. pm/worker/paused all short-circuit at exit 2 or 3).
  • 2 (NOOP): print the guard's stdout verbatim and stop. The canonical message for this branch is Engineering board: already in PM mode. No action taken.
  • 3 (REFUSE): print the guard's stdout verbatim and stop. The canonical messages for this branch are either:
    • Engineering board: currently in worker mode (discipline=<value>). Restart the session to switch to PM mode. No action taken.
    • Engineering board: currently paused. Run /board-resume first, then /pm-start. No action taken.

The four canonical messages live in hooks/scripts/board-mode-guard.sh so the same matrix is enforced identically by /pm-start, /worker-start, /board-pause, and /board-resume. Do not re-implement the matrix in this file.

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 "". (The hook will populate it on the next Stop turn anyway.)

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 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. 3d ago First seen · 92 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A e8e4ecc18b18

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pm-start is a command published in the GitHub repository GhostlyGawd/engineering-board (0 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,217 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.