What is alive:capture-context?

A workflow for saving outside material—such as emails, meeting transcripts, screenshots, documents, files, articles, or research—into an organised context system. It identifies the material, records its source and sensitivity, stores the original content, and routes it to a bundle.

Use it when external content is shared or when you need to check an inbox for unrouted files. It can also extract tasks from captured material.

Useful information arriving during a session can otherwise remain scattered or be forgotten. This workflow preserves the original material and helps place it where later work can find it.

alive:capture-context — Skill by alivecontext

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/alivecontext/alive/capture-context

Any agent

npx skills add alivecontext/alive --skill capture-context

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivecontext/alive

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,267 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00074	$0.03267
Opus 5	$0.00037	$0.01633
Sonnet 5	$0.00015	$0.00653
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00327

Measured 2d ago against content hash f3d4f2bdf966, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alive:capture-context 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.

plugins/alive/skills/capture-context/SKILL.md · 329 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 329 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Capture

Bring context in. The most important skill in the system.

If capture is hard, people skip it. If people skip it, the system dies. Capture must feel instant.

When It Fires

File pasted or dropped into conversation
Email forwarded or pulled via API
Transcript from a call or meeting
Screenshot shared
Content pasted from another app
API context pulled (Gmail, Slack, Calendar)
Research completed during a session
The human says "capture this" or "add this"
Squirrel detects external content and offers to capture
The human says "check inbox", "clear inputs", or "what's in my inbox"
Capture is invoked with no obvious in-conversation content (triggers inbox scan — see below)

Capture is one of two operations that writes mid-session (the other is bundle drafts). Everything else waits for save.

Three Stages

Stage 0 — Detect and Classify (instant)

No processing. Just identification.

ref_type — email, transcript, screenshot, document, message, article, research
sensitivity — public, private, restricted (default: private)
source — gmail, slack, web, manual, in-session

Stage 1 — Store Raw + Route to Bundle (always happens, non-negotiable)

Even if extraction fails or is skipped, the raw content is preserved.

Pre-capture check: Before proposing a destination, grep the target walnut's bundle manifests and brief.md files for the inbox filename. If found, the file is already referenced — route into that bundle's raw/ with a note "file was already cited by this bundle" rather than creating a duplicate reference elsewhere.

Routing decision: Check _kernel/now.json for an active bundle: field.

If active bundle exists — all three steps are mandatory, not optional:

Write raw file → {bundle}/raw/[name].[ext] with frontmatter added (type, date, source, squirrel — see type-specific templates below)
Update manifest → add entry to context_routes: list in {bundle}/context.manifest.yaml with path:, description:, type:, date: (see Manifest Enrichment below)
Add inline summary → append structured summary to manifest body (## Summary, ## Key Points, ## Action Items) so the raw file rarely needs to be re-read

Read the full file on GitHub · 329 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.

2d ago First seen · 329 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A f3d4f2bdf966

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alive:capture-context is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivecontext/alive (127 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 3,267 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.

Memory and context Research Writing and docs ai-tools claude-code claude-code-plugin cli context-management markdown

crit-cli

Use when an agent needs to author or reply to crit inline comments programmatically (including multi-agent workflows commenting on shared code/plans/docs/proposals), publish or unpublish a crit review with crit share, sync a crit review to or from a GitHub PR or GitLab MR, or read/interpret a crit review JSON file.…

tomasz-tomczyk/crit · 110 tokens

crit

Review code changes, a plan, a live page (running dev server), or a local HTML file with Crit inline comments and structured human feedback. Use only when the user explicitly invokes /crit or directly asks to use Crit; a generic review request does not count.

tomasz-tomczyk/crit · 55 tokens

alive:capture-context