groundwork AGENTS.md

A library of 40 skills for Claude Code covering software work from discovery and design through test-driven development, debugging, validation, and release. TDD means writing tests to describe expected behavior before implementing it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to route development tasks to the appropriate skill and to install the skills in other AI coding tools.
Why use it?
It gives agents a structured workflow for each stage instead of relying on one general set of instructions.

Instructions file for CodexOpenCode

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 instructions/etr/groundwork/agents-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/etr/groundwork

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 1,948 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,948 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
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 $0.01948 $0.01948
Opus 5 $0.00974 $0.00974
Sonnet 5 $0.00390 $0.00390
Haiku 4.5 $0.00195 $0.00195

Measured yesterday against content hash 0dfeae0e6714, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

groundwork AGENTS.md 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

AGENTS.md · 134 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AGENTS.md

This file provides guidance to Codex (Codex.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Project Overview

Groundwork is a Claude Code plugin that provides a skills library for structured development workflows. It contains 40 skills spanning the full lifecycle — discovery, domain modeling, architecture, planning, TDD, debugging, validation, and shipping. Every capability is a skill; there is no separate commands layer (skills are both user-invocable via /groundwork:<name> and, where appropriate, model-invocable).

The using-groundwork skill is the lifecycle router: it maps work → skill across every phase and is the only way the model can surface user-only leaves (which are invisible to it at call time). When authoring or editing a skill, see docs/developing-skills.md (contributor guide: anatomy, frontmatter, tier selection, authoring discipline, progressive disclosure).

Project Structure

This is a Claude Code plugin, not a traditional software project. There is no build step for Claude Code use. A separate installer (install-skills.sh) exports the skills to other AI coding harnesses (see "Multi-target installation" below).

groundwork/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json  # Plugin manifest
├── skills/                     # Markdown-based workflow skills (SKILL.md files) — the only entry-point layer
├── agents/                     # Subagent definitions (AGENT.md files)
├── hooks/                      # Event-driven automation (SessionStart, PostToolUse, SubagentStop, PreCompact)
├── lib/                        # JavaScript utilities (+ co-located *.test.js)
├── references/                 # Runtime reference files loaded by skills/agents
│   ├── checklists/             # Shared checklists read by BOTH a producer skill and a reviewer agent (testing: test-driven-development ↔ test-quality-reviewer; accessibility: ux-design ↔ design-consistency-checker)
│   └── engineering-principles.md  # Named-principle vocabulary (deep modules, Hyrum's Law, Chesterton's Fence, …)
├── tests/                      # Node test suites; run via tests/run-tests.sh
├── docs/                       # User-facing documentation
├── install-skills.sh           # Multi-target export installer (Codex, OpenCode, Kiro, Pi)
├── install-config.txt          # Export exceptions (drops + renames); fail-closed by default
└── pi-extension/               # Pre-built TypeScript extension copied into Pi installs

Read the full file on GitHub · 134 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 · 134 lines · 1,948 tokens per session scan A 0dfeae0e6714

Subscribe to this mod's changes

groundwork AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository etr/groundwork (42 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,948 tokens to every session, about $0.0097 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.

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