briefing

A read-only project briefing that gathers recent work signals from configured issue trackers, Git history, and working files into a short status summary.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps summarise project status, recent commits, issue-tracker activity, working-memory files, and other available progress signals.
Why use it?
It helps you quickly recover context when starting a session, returning after a break, or forgetting where work stopped.

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/backchainai/backchain-plugins/briefing
Any agent
npx skills add backchainai/backchain-plugins --skill briefing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/backchainai/backchain-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,020 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 $0.00109 $0.01020
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.00510
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00204
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00102

Measured 2d ago against content hash 69471067afcc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

briefing 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.

engram/skills/briefing/SKILL.md · 90 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 90 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Briefing

Produce a concise orientation briefing for session start or context recovery. Aggregate signals from multiple sources into a single scannable summary so the user can quickly re-orient.

Read-only. Reads issue-tracker state and git history; never writes, never modifies state.

Relationship to native /recap

Native Claude Code /recap (v2.1.108+) provides a recap of prior session activity when returning after a 75+ minute absence, or on demand. briefing complements /recap rather than replacing it:

  • /recap is auto-triggered after idle and operates on Claude Code session history.
  • briefing is invoked explicitly and aggregates cross-tool signals: issue tracker, git, working-memory presence, staging directory staleness.

Use /recap when you want the narrative of the last session. Use briefing when you want a structured snapshot of where the project stands across tools.

Data sources

briefing reads from sources the user's project has configured. Detect available sources from project signals; ask the user when ambiguous.

Signal Source detection What to read
Issue tracker .beads/ directory → Beads. .linear/ or environment → Linear. gh CLI authenticated → GitHub Issues. Explicit declaration in CLAUDE.md → use that. None of the above → ask the user. Ready / available work, in-progress items, blocked items, project counts
Git activity Always available in a git repo Recent commits (last 10), uncommitted changes (git status --short)
Working memory A .memory/ directory in the working tree → see the working skill Active in-progress checkpoint state
Staging dir A configured staging directory (often outputs/) Files older than 7 days as a staleness signal

If a source is unavailable, skip it gracefully and note the gap in the output. Do not fail the whole briefing if one source is missing.

Read the full file on GitHub · 90 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 90 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 69471067afcc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

briefing is a skill published in the GitHub repository backchainai/backchain-plugins (4 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 1,020 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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