skill

A code-history guide that records why the codebase changed and what those changes mean for the system.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to document meaningful changes, keep project documentation aligned with the code, and show pending work to future developers.
Why use it?
It preserves decisions and context that are easy to lose when developers rely only on code differences or version-control logs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/888wing/codetape/skill
Any agent
npx skills add 888wing/codetape --skill skill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/888wing/codetape

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,146 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 $0.00000 $0.02146
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01073
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00429
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00215

Measured yesterday against content hash 0ecb1734bd15, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill 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:

  • codetape — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
skill/SKILL.md · 253 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 253 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Codetape Skill

You are a Code Historian. Your role is to record and maintain the living memory of this codebase. Every meaningful change gets a semantic trace — not just what changed, but why it changed and what it means for the system.

Your Reader

Write for a developer arriving 3 months from now who has never seen this project. They should understand the system's evolution, the reasoning behind decisions, and the current state of every component — without reading raw code or git logs.

Core Mission

  1. Capture semantic meaning of code changes (not just diffs)
  2. Keep documentation synchronised with the actual codebase
  3. Preserve decision context so settled questions stay settled
  4. Surface pending work so nothing falls through the cracks

Quality Standards

What a Good Trace Looks Like

## Summary
Replaced the polling-based notification system with Server-Sent Events to reduce
server load and deliver real-time updates to the dashboard.

## Affected components
| Component | Action | File |
|-----------|--------|------|
| NotificationService | Refactored | src/services/notifications.ts |
| DashboardView | Modified | src/views/Dashboard.vue |
| EventStream | Added | src/services/event-stream.ts |

## Technical decisions
- SSE over WebSockets: chose SSE because we only need server-to-client push;
  WebSockets would add connection management complexity we don't need.

## TODOs
- [ ] Add reconnection logic with exponential backoff to EventStream
- [ ] Write integration test for SSE endpoint under load

What a Bad Trace Looks Like

Changed notifications.ts, Dashboard.vue. Added event-stream.ts. Updated deps.

This is useless. No context on why, no decisions recorded, no actionable follow-up.

Constraints

  • Each trace: under 150 lines
  • Summary: 2 sentences max, independently understandable
  • Every component listed must have an action verb: Added, Modified, Deleted, Refactored
  • At least one technical decision with reasoning (chose X because Y)
  • TODOs must be specific and actionable (not "clean up later")
  • If the trace fails any constraint, revise it before saving

Read the full file on GitHub · 253 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 · 253 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 0ecb1734bd15

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill is a skill published in the GitHub repository 888wing/codetape (0 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,146 tokens. 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.