alive:create-walnut

A workflow for creating a new organised project area, called a walnut, for a venture, experiment, person, life area, or codebase. It builds the standard files for identity, history, and ongoing knowledge, and can map or move existing files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start a new ALIVE project area, describe its purpose, generate its name and metadata, choose the appropriate codebase template when needed, and optionally migrate files.
Why use it?
A new area of work needs a consistent place for its background, decisions, insights, and source material. This workflow creates that structure and can bring related existing content into it.

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/alivecontext/alive/create-walnut
Any agent
npx skills add alivecontext/alive --skill create-walnut
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivecontext/alive

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,961 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 $0.00063 $0.03961
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.01980
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00792
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00396

Measured 2d ago against content hash 086ac797ec9e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alive:create-walnut 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/create-walnut/SKILL.md · 349 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 349 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create

Scaffold a new walnut — any type, any ALIVE domain. Understand it first, map where its context lives, then scaffold. Optionally bring in existing content (Step 7 — only if the human has files to migrate).

Not a setup wizard (that's world/setup.md — first-time only). Not opening an existing walnut (that's alive:load-context).


Template Locations

The squirrel MUST read these templates before writing — not reconstruct from memory. Templates live relative to the plugin install path.

templates/walnut/key.md            → _kernel/key.md
templates/walnut/key-codebase.md   → _kernel/key.md (codebase variant, Step 2b)
templates/walnut/log.md            → _kernel/log.md
templates/walnut/insights.md       → _kernel/insights.md

Placeholders

Used in key.md and key-codebase.md:

Placeholder Source
{{type}} Step 1 selection
{{goal}} Extracted from Step 2 free text
{{name}} Kebab-case slug derived from Step 2
{{date}} Current ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD)
{{description}} The human's free text from Step 2, lightly cleaned

Additional placeholders in key-codebase.md (Step 2b only):

Placeholder Source
{{repo}} Repository URL from Step 2b
{{local_path}} Local clone path from Step 2b
{{github_account}} GitHub account or org from Step 2b
{{stack}} Tech stack summary from Step 2b
{{branch}} Default branch name from Step 2b

Used in entry.yaml (squirrel — written by session-new hook, not by this skill):

Placeholder Source
{{session_id}} Current session ID
{{engine}} Current model (e.g. claude-opus-4-6)
{{walnut}} Same as {{name}}
{{squirrel_name}} From preferences.yaml squirrel_name: or null
{{timestamp}} ISO timestamp at session start
{{transcript}} Path to session transcript JSONL
{{cwd}} Working directory at session start
{{rules_loaded}} Count of rules loaded at session start

Read the full file on GitHub · 349 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 · 349 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A 086ac797ec9e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alive:create-walnut is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivecontext/alive (127 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 3,961 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.