ashlr-lean-tools

ashlr-lean-tools is a skill for Claude Code from ashlrai/ashlr-plugin. It costs 52 tokens per session (628 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of tool-use practices for reducing unnecessary tokens and round trips during coding work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when navigating a codebase, searching for code, making several edits, and verifying changes efficiently.
Why use it?
It avoids repeated reads, separates exploration from editing, and groups related changes into fewer operations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the ashlr plugin — 11 skills, 36 commands, 5 agents, 7 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin/ashlr-lean-tools
Any agent
npx skills add ashlrai/ashlr-plugin --skill ashlr-lean-tools
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ashlr, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 36 commands, 5 agents, 7 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 ashlr-lean-tools

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin/ashlr-lean-tools.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin/ashlr-lean-tools)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin/ashlr-lean-tools"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ashlrai/ashlr-plugin/ashlr-lean-tools.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 628 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 5.1 $0.00052 $0.00628
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00314
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00126
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00063

Measured 5d ago against content hash e34caa5c7852, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ashlr-lean-tools 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 5d 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/ashlr-lean-tools/SKILL.md · 44 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 44 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ashlr Lean Tools

A discipline layer for tool use: each rule targets a specific token-waste pattern that commonly appears in long sessions.

Rules (active when this skill is enabled)

1. Read-once

Do not re-read a file that is already in context. If you opened src/auth.ts earlier this session and haven't been told it changed, use the content you already have. Re-reads are the single largest source of avoidable input-token spend.

2. Batch edits via ashlr__multi_edit

When making 2+ edits to the same file, collect them into a single ashlr__multi_edit call instead of sequential ashlr__edit calls. Multi-edit applies all changes in one round-trip and returns a single compact diff.

3. Orient before searching

Run ashlr__orient once at the start of each task. The genome overview typically resolves "where does X live?" without any file reads. Skip orient only when continuing work in a file you already have open.

4. Skip verification reads after a successful edit/write

ashlr__edit and ashlr__write confirm success by returning a diff. Do not read the file again just to confirm the change landed — that's redundant and costs the full file content in tokens.

5. Grep-before-read

Before opening a file to find something, run ashlr__grep first. If the grep result shows the relevant lines, use them directly — no full file read needed.

6. Shift to concise output when session spend is high

When the session has accumulated >5,000 tokens of tool-call output, prefer shorter responses: skip preamble, use file:line citations instead of quoted blocks, and omit trailing summaries when the diff speaks for itself.

7. Prefer ashlr__bash over native Bash for verbose commands

ashlr__bash auto-compresses long stdout (test runners, git log, find, npm ls) — 60–90% token savings on large output.

Anti-patterns

  • Re-reading a file that hasn't changed since you last read it
  • Two sequential ashlr__edit calls on the same file (use ashlr__multi_edit)
  • Opening a file just to confirm an edit you just made
  • Running Read before Grep to find a function
  • Quoting large file contents in prose when a file:line reference suffices

Read the full file on GitHub · 44 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. 5d ago First seen · 44 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A e34caa5c7852

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ashlr-lean-tools is a skill published in the GitHub repository ashlrai/ashlr-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 628 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 2026-08-31.