brief-me

brief-me is a skill for Claude Code from adamlinscott/claude-skills. It costs 145 tokens per session (1,681 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A short plain-English briefing for returning to a long-running coding session after losing track of it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after a distraction or break to learn what the session is about, what has actually changed, what is unfinished, what the agent needs from you, and the next step.
Why use it?
It replaces stale memory with a summary based on the repository, recent commits, changes, plans, and test results.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; built for gstack.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is **This skill is deprecated. Use [`/where-are-we`](../where-are-we/SKILL.md) instead.**.

Part of the claude-skills plugin — 20 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it after a distraction or break to learn what the session is about, what has actually changed, what is unfinished, what the agent needs from you, and the next step.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adamlinscott/claude-skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills.

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 brief-me

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for brief-me

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/adamlinscott/claude-skills/brief-me.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 145 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,681 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00145 $0.01681
Opus 5.5 $0.00058 $0.00672
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00029 $0.00336
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00168

Measured 2d ago against content hash 800b630e4827, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brief-me 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 2d 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.

skills/brief-me/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brief Me — DEPRECATED

This skill is deprecated. Use /where-are-we instead.

If someone has invoked this, tell them in one line that it is retired, then run /where-are-we for them. Run the brief below only if they explicitly ask for this one anyway.

Why it was retired. /where-are-we covers the same re-entry case and scales to the gap: it checks how long the user has been away, gives just done and left to someone who is still active, and adds a paragraph on what the task is for someone who has been gone. Six fixed headings were more than most re-entries needed.

The user has come back to this session with weak or no memory of it. Reading the last message will not fix that: the last message was written for someone who was here five minutes ago. It leans on pronouns, on shorthand coined mid-session, and on file names introduced hours back. It continues the thread; it does not introduce it.

Produce one short briefing that puts them back in the chair. Then stop.

1. Check the state before you narrate

The failure mode of this skill is a fluent, confident, wrong story. Guard against it by reading the real state first, not your memory of it:

  • git status and git diff --stat against the base branch — what is actually changed, and is anything half-applied?
  • git log for recent commits, and the current branch name.
  • Any plan, spec, or todo file written during this session, and the active todo list.
  • Whether tests were run, and what they said.

Then hold two categories apart as you write. A claim backed by disk or git is stated flat. A claim recalled from the conversation and not checkable is marked as recalled, with the check named. Never assert a piece of work is finished without confirming the file exists.

2. The brief

Six headings, in this order. The whole thing fits on one screen.

In one line — the entire session in one sentence a stranger could follow.

What we're doing — the goal in plain terms, one or two sentences. This thread, not the codebase.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 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. 2d ago Changed · +10 lines · +19 tokens per session 800b630e4827
  2. 1mo ago Changed · -4 lines c0f8dec98ffc
  3. 1mo ago Changed · +1 tokens per session dd5c6a323022
  4. 1mo ago Changed · +4 tokens per session 9669d8dbf351
  5. 1mo ago First seen · 127 lines · 121 tokens per session scan A b425953bc77c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brief-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository adamlinscott/claude-skills (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 1,681 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

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