shift-notes

A prose handoff file that records what a coding project has finished, what is in progress, known issues, and what should happen next.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to pass context between coding-agent sessions, including changed files, unfinished features, test problems, and environment details.
Why use it?
It prevents a new work session from having to reconstruct the project state from the code after the previous session ends.

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/shift-notes
Any agent
npx skills add Archive228/loopkit --skill shift-notes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Archive228/loopkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 955 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 $0.00047 $0.00955
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00477
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00191
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00096

Measured 2d ago against content hash 65efaa0b1d49, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

shift-notes 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/shift-notes/SKILL.md · 74 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 74 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Shift Notes

The hard problem in long-running agents is not doing work in one session — it's bridging the context gap between sessions. Every fresh agent starts with zero memory. If it has to reconstruct project state from the code, it burns 5-10 minutes and a chunk of context before writing a line. If it has a well-shaped handoff file, that drops to 30-60 seconds.

That handoff file is claude-progress.txt (or equivalent). Prose, not JSON. The model writes prose more naturally, and the read is cheap.

The format — write into this shape

# Project: <name>
# Last updated: <ISO timestamp> by session <id>

## What's done
- <feature> [feature-list index: N]
- ...

## What's in progress
- <feature> [feature-list index: N]
  Status: <one paragraph — what works, what doesn't>
  Files touched this session: <list>
  Known open issues: <list>

## What's next (recommended)
- <feature> [feature-list index: N]
  Reason: <why this one>

## Notes for the next session
<free-form prose: gotchas, flaky tests, environment quirks>

Enforced softly by the prompt, not by validation. Free text is the point — the notes section is where the previous shift warns the next one about the thing that isn't captured anywhere else.

Writing the notes — at end of session

  • Move the completed feature from "in progress" to "done".
  • Recommend the next feature in "what's next" with a one-line reason (unblocks-N, low-risk, prerequisite-for-M).
  • Notes-for-next-session is the highest-leverage field. Use it for: flaky tests you hit, dependencies that surprised you, spec ambiguities you resolved one way (so the next agent doesn't re-litigate), env vars that need to be set.
  • Do not delete "done" entries. They're audit trail. If the section gets long, that's a signal to compact the whole notes file at v0.2 milestones, not to prune mid-project.

Reading the notes — at start of session

  • Read the whole file. It's small.
  • If shift notes and git log disagree, trust the git log. The notes can be truncated by a crashed session; the log can't. This is a load-bearing rule.
  • Cross-reference "what's done" against the feature list. If the notes claim done but the feature list says not-done, run broken-window-check.
  • Pick work from "what's next" unless it's stale (a new session already picked it).

Read the full file on GitHub · 74 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 · 74 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 65efaa0b1d49

Subscribe to this mod's changes

shift-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository Archive228/loopkit (753 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 955 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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