session-start

session-start is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ahmadulhoq/agentskel. It costs 43 tokens per session (2,891 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A session-start procedure that checks whether the project’s shared memory is available, reads required memory files, and checks related dependencies. If memory is missing, it tells the user how to mount it or that setup is needed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Initialising coding-agent sessions and checking memory, dependency, and project setup status.
Why use it?
It prevents work from starting without the project context the agent is expected to use. It also surfaces stale or missing memory before other tasks begin.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 agentskel plugin — 53 skills, 3 hooks 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 skills/ahmadulhoq/agentskel/session-start
Any agent
npx skills add ahmadulhoq/agentskel --skill session-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ahmadulhoq/agentskel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agentskel, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 53 skills, 3 hooks.

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 session-start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ahmadulhoq/agentskel/session-start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ahmadulhoq/agentskel/session-start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ahmadulhoq/agentskel/session-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ahmadulhoq/agentskel/session-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,891 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 $0.00043 $0.02891
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01445
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00289

Measured 3d ago against content hash d27f1c69de0e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

session-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.

.agents/skills/session-start/SKILL.md · 195 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 195 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Session Start Procedure

Execute every step below in order. Do not skip steps. Do not start any user task until this procedure is complete.

Step 1 — Check memory mount

  • Check whether .memory/ exists in the repo root.
  • Exists → pull the latest memory from remote before reading anything:
    git -C .memory pull --ff-only origin ai-memory 2>/dev/null || true
    
    If the pull fails (e.g. network unavailable, diverged history), warn the user but proceed — stale memory is better than no memory. Then continue to Step 2.
  • Does NOT exist → STOP. Do not start any task. Instead:
    1. Run git branch -r | grep origin/ai-memory
    2. Found → tell the user:

      "This project has AI memory but it's not mounted. Run ./scripts/install-agent.sh (or git worktree add .memory ai-memory) to load it, then restart this session."

    3. Not found → tell the user:

      "This project has no AI memory. A tech lead needs to run the setup-skeleton workflow first. See the agentskel README for setup instructions."

    4. End session. Do not attempt any work without memory files.

External skill packs (e.g. Google's android/skills) install into a shared per-machine store at ~/.agentskel/skills/ and are surfaced to each project via gitignored symlinks under .agents/skills/. After a teammate pulls a sync that introduced new external skill entries — or after a fresh clone — the manifest exists but the symlinks do not yet. Detect and auto-recover before reading anything else.

  • Check whether .agents/skills/.gitignore exists.
  • Does not exist → no external skills configured for this project. Skip to Step 2.
  • Exists → read the manifest (non-comment, non-blank lines are external skill directory names). For each entry, check whether .agents/skills/[name] exists as a symlink.
    • If every entry resolves to an existing symlink → skip to Step 2.
    • If any entry is missing → run bash scripts/install-agent.sh once. The script is idempotent: it re-pulls .memory/, then for each manifest entry tries to create a symlink pointing into ~/.agentskel/skills/. Surface any "shared store missing pack" warnings the script prints to the user, and offer to run the update-external-skills workflow now if a pack needs installing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 195 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 · 195 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A d27f1c69de0e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

session-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository ahmadulhoq/agentskel (13 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,891 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 2026-09-02.

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