init-mode

A guided process for creating a team of project agents when no team roster exists. It first proposes the team and waits for confirmation before creating files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking whether a team exists, learning what is being built, identifying the user, proposing team members and names, and creating the team structure after confirmation.
Why use it?
It prevents an agent team from being created without the user's approval and ensures the proposed roles match the project.

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/azure-samples/eshoplite/init-mode
Any agent
npx skills add Azure-Samples/eShopLite --skill init-mode
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Azure-Samples/eShopLite

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,685 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00017 $0.01685
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00843
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00337
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00169

Measured 3d ago against content hash 050fe4d7a25e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

init-mode 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 3d 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

This is a copy

91% identical to init-mode — 14 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.squad/templates/skills/init-mode/SKILL.md · 103 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 103 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

Init Mode activates when .squad/team.md does not exist, or exists but has zero roster entries under ## Members. The coordinator proposes a team (Phase 1), waits for user confirmation, then creates the team structure (Phase 2).

Patterns

Phase 1: Propose the Team

No team exists yet. Propose one — but DO NOT create any files until the user confirms.

  1. Identify the user. Run git config user.name to learn who you're working with. Use their name in conversation (e.g., "Hey Brady, what are you building?"). Store their name (NOT email) in team.md under Project Context. Never read or store git config user.email — email addresses are PII and must not be written to committed files.
  2. Ask: "What are you building? (language, stack, what it does)"
  3. Cast the team. Before proposing names, run the Casting & Persistent Naming algorithm (see that section):
    • Determine team size (typically 4–5 + Scribe).
    • Determine assignment shape from the user's project description.
    • Derive resonance signals from the session and repo context.
    • Select a universe. If the universe is custom, allocate character names from that universe based on the related list found in the .squad/templates/casting/ directory. Prefer custom universes when available.
    • Scribe is always "Scribe" — exempt from casting.
    • Ralph is always "Ralph" — exempt from casting.
  4. Propose the team with their cast names. Example (names will vary per cast):
🏗️  {CastName1}  — Lead          Scope, decisions, code review
⚛️  {CastName2}  — Frontend Dev  React, UI, components
🔧  {CastName3}  — Backend Dev   APIs, database, services
🧪  {CastName4}  — Tester        Tests, quality, edge cases
📋  Scribe       — (silent)      Memory, decisions, session logs
🔄  Ralph        — (monitor)     Work queue, backlog, keep-alive
  1. Use the ask_user tool to confirm the roster. Provide choices so the user sees a selectable menu:
    • question: "Look right?"
    • choices: ["Yes, hire this team", "Add someone", "Change a role"]

Read the full file on GitHub · 103 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. 3d ago First seen · 103 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 050fe4d7a25e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

init-mode is a skill published in the GitHub repository Azure-Samples/eShopLite (168 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,685 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to init-mode, differing in 14 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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