ballast

A goal-driven workflow for working in an unfamiliar field. It breaks a goal into the foundations it needs, learns missing pieces, reuses existing knowledge, and keeps solved paths for later work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build knowledge for unfamiliar goals, identify what must be learned, reuse previous solutions, and verify that each completed path passes a check.
Why use it?
It helps turn a broad task into checked steps when you do not yet know the subject area.

Plugin for Claude Code

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 plugins/svy04/ballast/marketplace
Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add svy04/ballast
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/svy04/ballast

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session not measured What this adds to a session before it is invoked.
When invoked not measured Not applicable: nothing here is loaded into a session.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Security

Grade A, and why

ballast 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.

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json · 15 lines

What it actually says

{
  "name": "ballast",
  "description": "Builds up to a goal in a field you have no expertise in — learns the foundations it needs and keeps every solved path for the next goal.",
  "owner": {
    "name": "svy04"
  },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "ballast",
      "source": "./",
      "description": "Builds up to a goal in a field you have no expertise in: splits it into the foundations that goal actually needs, mobilizes what you already hold, learns what is missing, and leaves every solved path behind for the next goal. Nothing is called done until a check passes."
    }
  ]
}
Files

What ships with it

1 file beside marketplace.json in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 15 lines scan A 53b27c883c7f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ballast is a plugin published in the GitHub repository svy04/ballast (71 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. Its token cost is not measured: this kind of file is read by the harness, not the model. 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.

Related

Other plugins, from other repositories