arn-code-help

A read-only guide to the current position in the Arness development workflow. It shows the active stage and recommends the next command, while also detecting related Arness work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check pipeline status, see the workflow stages, and get guidance on the next step.
Why use it?
It answers where a project is in the process and what should happen next without changing files or project state.

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/appsvortex/arness/arn-code-help
Any agent
npx skills add AppsVortex/arness --skill arn-code-help
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AppsVortex/arness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,487 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 $0.00078 $0.02487
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01243
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00497
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00249

Measured yesterday against content hash 7411f8527ff3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

arn-code-help 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 yesterday.

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/arn-code/skills/arn-code-help/SKILL.md · 141 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 141 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Arness Help

Detect the user's current position in the Arness workflow pipeline, render an ASCII diagram with the active stage marked, and suggest the next command to run. Supports cross-plugin awareness — detects activity in Arness Spark and Arness Infra and provides hints at the bottom of the output. This skill is strictly read-only -- it never modifies files or project state.

Allowed tools: Read, Glob, Grep only. This skill MUST NOT use Write, Edit, Bash, or Task tools. This skill MUST NOT invoke any agents.

Workflow

Step 0: Multi-Plugin Awareness

  1. From the ## Arness section (loaded in Step 1), detect other plugin field groups:
    • spark_fields_present: true if Vision directory OR Use cases directory OR Prototypes directory present
    • infra_fields_present: true if Infra plans directory OR Infra specs directory present
  2. For each detected plugin, do a quick existence check (max 2 files):
    • Spark: Check if <Vision directory>/product-concept.md exists
    • Infra: Check if <Infra plans directory> has any subdirectories, OR if Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml exists in the project root
  3. Record { plugin_name, has_activity: bool } for each detected plugin.
  4. Proceed to Step 1. Cross-plugin hints are appended AFTER own status is rendered in Step 3.

Step 1: Load Configuration

  1. Read the project's CLAUDE.md file.
  2. Extract the ## Arness section.
  3. From the ## Arness section, extract core fields:
    • Plans directory (e.g., .arness/plans/)
    • Specs directory (e.g., .arness/specs/)
    • Docs directory (e.g., .arness/docs/)

If ## Arness is missing: Skip to Step 3 and render the core pipeline diagram with all stages unmarked. Suggest the user run /arn-planning to get started for an existing project, or /arn-brainstorming for a brand-new project (requires arn-spark). Do not attempt detection.


Step 2: Detect Pipeline Position

Read the pipeline reference file at ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/arn-code-help/references/pipeline-map.md to load detection rules, context-aware rendering rules, and next-step tables.

Read the full file on GitHub · 141 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. yesterday First seen · 141 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 7411f8527ff3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

arn-code-help is a skill published in the GitHub repository AppsVortex/arness (33 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 2,487 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.