vibe-start-informed

vibe-start-informed is a skill for Claude Code from ash1794/vibe-engineering. It costs 45 tokens per session (732 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow that finds real projects, papers, and documented failures before a new feature, architecture, or technology is proposed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when brainstorming features, designing a new system, comparing technology choices, or handling another creative task with several possible approaches.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of choosing an approach without learning from existing work and known problems. It is intended for design and exploration, not already-defined implementation tasks or bug fixes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the vibe-engineering plugin — 38 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when brainstorming features, designing a new system, comparing technology choices, or handling another creative task with several possible approaches.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/vibe-start-informed
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ash1794/vibe-engineering --skill vibe-start-informed
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ash1794/vibe-engineering

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install vibe-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 38 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for vibe-start-informed

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/vibe-start-informed.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/vibe-start-informed)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/vibe-start-informed"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ash1794/vibe-engineering/vibe-start-informed.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 732 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00045 $0.00732
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00366
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00146
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00073

Measured 8d ago against content hash 5120edb66a5a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vibe-start-informed 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 8d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/vibe-engineering/skills/vibe-start-informed/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

vibe-start-informed

Other people's documented failures count as observed failure. Research SOTA before proposing anything.

When to Use

  • Brainstorming new features or capabilities
  • Designing architecture for a new sub-system
  • Choosing between technology approaches
  • Any creative/design task where multiple valid approaches exist

Not for: Implementing already-designed specs, bug fixes, or tasks with clear requirements.

When NOT to Use

  • Implementing an already-designed spec with clear requirements
  • Bug fixes where the approach is already known
  • Routine/mechanical changes with one obvious correct solution
  • When the design decision has already been researched and recorded

The Rule

BEFORE proposing any approach, dispatch a research agent to find real papers, real projects, and real production systems that solve the same (or adjacent) problem.

digraph start_informed {
    "Design question identified" [shape=doublecircle];
    "Decompose into sub-problems" [shape=box];
    "Dispatch research agent (WebSearch)" [shape=box];
    "For each sub-problem find:" [shape=box];
    "Synthesize imported failures" [shape=box];
    "NOW propose approaches" [shape=doublecircle];

    "Design question identified" -> "Decompose into sub-problems";
    "Decompose into sub-problems" -> "Dispatch research agent (WebSearch)";
    "Dispatch research agent (WebSearch)" -> "For each sub-problem find:";
    "For each sub-problem find:" -> "Synthesize imported failures";
    "Synthesize imported failures" -> "NOW propose approaches";
}

Research Requirements

For each sub-problem, find:

Requirement Minimum Example
Named projects 2+ with stars/adoption "Graphiti (23k stars)"
Papers with venue 1+ with year "RAPTOR (ICLR 2024)"
Mechanism described What it actually does Not marketing copy
Known failures What went wrong "Flat RAG failed at multi-hop"
Applicability assessment How it maps to our system Specific, not generic

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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. 8d ago First seen · 77 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 5120edb66a5a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vibe-start-informed is a skill published in the GitHub repository ash1794/vibe-engineering (10 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 732 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 2026-08-31.

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