progress-reading-protocol

A fixed opening routine for coding-agent sessions on an ongoing project. It requires checking the current folder, reading progress and decisions, reviewing recent changes, counting unfinished work, running setup, and testing the latest feature before editing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a fresh or resumed coding session, especially before implementing a new feature or fix.
Why use it?
It reconstructs the project's state after a new session or context reset. This helps avoid building on unfinished work or silently broken code.

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/archive228/loopkit/progress-reading-protocol
Any agent
npx skills add Archive228/loopkit --skill progress-reading-protocol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Archive228/loopkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,053 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00057 $0.01053
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00526
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00105

Measured 2d ago against content hash ce632f26675f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

progress-reading-protocol scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

6. **Smoke-test the most recently "completed" feature** — drive it end-to-end via the browser-automation tool, `curl`, or the actual CLI. Not unit tests. If it fails, invoke [[broken-window-check]]: revert the offending
skills/progress-reading-protocol/SKILL.md · 51 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 51 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Progress-Reading Protocol

You have no memory of the previous session. The repo does. Every fresh session burns 5-10 minutes reconstructing state unless you follow a fixed opening sequence — with the sequence, it drops to 30-60 seconds. The cost is 2-4k tokens at the top of every session; the payoff crosses over past four sessions on the same project.

Skipping steps is the failure mode. Sessions that skip the smoke-test step (6) reliably build new features on top of silently broken ones. See the "looks shipped, isn't shipped" bug (originally documented in the shift-work harness pattern).

When to apply

  • First tool calls of any coding-agent session in a multi-session project.
  • After a context reset, compaction, or crash mid-project — treat the resumed context as a fresh session.
  • Before you write a single line of new code. No exceptions for "quick fixes."

Procedure — run in order, no skipping

  1. pwd — confirm you are in the project directory. You may only edit files below this path.
  2. Read claude-progress.txt (or whatever the project's shift-notes file is called). This is the previous session's prose handoff. 2b. Read claude-decisions.json — the machine-readable ledger of decisions the loopkit pre-compact hook extracts before each compaction. Prose in claude-progress.txt tells you what the last session did; JSON in claude-decisions.json tells you what was chosen and rejected. If the two disagree on a specific choice, the JSON is the durable record. See [[active-memory-reminder]].
  3. git log --oneline -20 — see what was actually committed. If the progress file and the git log disagree, trust the git log. The progress file can be truncated by a crashed write; the log is append-only.
  4. Count remaining featurescat feature_list.json | jq '[.[] | select(.passes==false)] | length'. Adjust the field name to the project's schema. This anchors you to the source of truth for completion state.
  5. ./init.sh — bring up the dev server. If this fails, fixing it is your only job this session. Do not skip to feature work with a broken environment.
  6. Smoke-test the most recently "completed" feature — drive it end-to-end via the browser-automation tool, curl, or the actual CLI. Not unit tests. If it fails, invoke [[broken-window-check]]: revert the offending commit, flip the feature back to passes: false, and fix it before touching new work.

Read the full file on GitHub · 51 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. 2d ago First seen · 51 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A ce632f26675f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

progress-reading-protocol is a skill published in the GitHub repository Archive228/loopkit (753 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,053 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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