make-trace

A process for turning written instructions, such as a skill file, chat log, or runbook, into a runnable workflow called a trace. The trace is a folder containing a dependency map and step-by-step contracts that people and AI can follow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build a trace from an existing procedure, define its steps and dependencies, place inputs, run it with Flowtrace, and verify the finished workflow.
Why use it?
It converts prose into explicit steps, inputs, outputs, and checks, making the workflow easier to run and verify. It also drives the complete run lifecycle so the result is tested rather than only described.

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/aiscientists-dev/flowtrace/make-trace
Any agent
npx skills add AIScientists-Dev/Flowtrace --skill make-trace
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AIScientists-Dev/Flowtrace

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,647 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 $0.00076 $0.03647
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01824
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00729
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00365

Measured 2d ago against content hash 82cf0bdf0eb1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

make-trace 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/make-trace/SKILL.md · 191 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 191 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Make Trace

You turn a source (anything that describes how a kind of task gets done) into a trace: a folder holding a DAG that a human and an AI both read while the work runs. This skill covers the whole path, from a blank folder to a finished run.

Before you start

Two reads give you the full surface. Do them once:

  1. references/CLI.md (bundled next to this file) is the system contract: every command, the trace.json schema, the reply payload schema, the path rules, the state machine.
  2. The source itself. Read it closely; the steps you need are usually hiding in its prose. For a large or multi-file source, read the spine in full (the main document and any workflow section) and only sample the rest to confirm a step exists, rather than reading every file to the same depth.

The flowtrace binary drives everything. Get it in this order: honor $TRACE_BIN if it is set; else use it if it is on your PATH; else, inside a flowtrace checkout, use the build under target/ (target/release/flowtrace, else target/debug/flowtrace) or build one with ./scripts/install.sh from the repo root; else clone the repo first (git clone https://github.com/AIScientists-Dev/Flowtrace.git) and run its ./scripts/install.sh. Building needs Node and Rust and takes a few minutes the first time — it builds the web UI and the CLI and symlinks flowtrace to ~/.local/bin. When you forget a shape mid-task, the binary self-documents: flowtrace <cmd> --help, and flowtrace explain <type> (e.g. flowtrace explain trace, flowtrace explain reply).

The cycle

1. Scaffold

cd <wherever you keep traces>   # conventionally ~/traces/
flowtrace init <slug>               # creates <slug>/ with .git and an empty trace.json

flowtrace init makes a subfolder named <slug> under the current directory, not in place.

2. Lift the source into a DAG (the hard part)

Read the source and pull out the steps hiding in it. Fill trace.json#steps, and for each step set from_steps, its upstream dependencies. The DAG is the whole point: decide what runs in parallel and what fans in.

Read the full file on GitHub · 191 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md 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. 2d ago First seen · 191 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 82cf0bdf0eb1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

make-trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository AIScientists-Dev/Flowtrace (488 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 3,647 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

auth-web-cloudbase

CloudBase Web Authentication Quick Guide for frontend integration after auth-tool has already been checked. Provides concise and practical Web authentication solutions with multiple login methods and complete user management.

TencentCloudBase/CloudBase-AI-Toolkit · 38 tokens

fix-codesign-error

Slash command that inspects a macOS signing or entitlement failure and explains the minimum fix path. Invoke explicitly with /fix-codesign-error — this skill never self-triggers.

robinebers/openusage · 42 tokens

browse-and-evaluate

Use when exploring the ai-agent-skills catalog to find, compare, and evaluate skills before installing. Always use --fields to limit output size and --dry-run before committing to an install.

MoizIbnYousaf/Ai-Agent-Skills · 43 tokens

specflow-use

To connect Rosetta with Grid Dynamics SpecFlow MCP; only when SpecFlow is mentioned and the MCP is installed.

griddynamics/rosetta · 27 tokens

loop-engineering

Shared loop-engineering reference for COG skills - the agent loop, deterministic verifiers, termination conditions, in-loop context management, and named patterns. Invoke when designing or debugging a skill that iterates (search-verify-retry, scan-until-dry, fetch-retry-gate).

huytieu/COG-second-brain · 63 tokens

telnyx-messaging-hosted-curl

Set up hosted SMS numbers, toll-free verification, and RCS messaging. Use when migrating numbers or enabling rich messaging features. This skill provides REST API (curl) examples.

team-telnyx/ai · 45 tokens