working

A tool for storing temporary conversation state in a project folder called `.memory/`, including tasks, decisions, and open questions, across multi-day coding sessions.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps create checkpoints, move useful working notes into permanent project knowledge, and remove temporary notes after they are saved.
Why use it?
It helps preserve the current state of unfinished work when a conversation ends before the work does.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,183 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 $0.00097 $0.01183
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00592
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00237
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00118

Measured yesterday against content hash b2c6b1dfc121, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

working 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 yesterday.

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/working/SKILL.md · 93 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 93 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Working Memory

Manage ephemeral .memory/ directories for persisting structured conversation state across multi-day Claude Code sessions. Three commands cover the full lifecycle:

Command Purpose
/engram:working checkpoint Create or update .memory/ with current conversation state
/engram:working promote Move .memory/ artifacts to permanent knowledge locations
/engram:working cleanup Delete promoted content, preserve the directory

The skill is invoked as /engram:working (the plugin-qualified skill name) followed by the subcommand. Natural-language phrasings like "checkpoint working memory" trigger the same dispatch.

Working memory vs auto memory

This skill complements Claude Code's native auto memory. They serve different purposes:

Working memory (this skill) Auto memory (native)
Trigger User-initiated (/engram:working checkpoint) Automatic (Claude decides what's worth remembering)
Content Structured work state — todos, decisions, questions Implicit learnings — corrections, preferences, patterns
Lifecycle Ephemeral: checkpoint → promote → cleanup Persistent until manually deleted
Scope Per-directory (.memory/ in CWD) Per-project (~/.claude/projects/<project>/)
Promotion path Explicit: ADRs, issue-tracker entries, docs Implicit: stays in MEMORY.md / topic files

Use working memory for structured in-flight work that warrants a deliberate promotion gate. Let auto memory handle preferences, build insights, and behavioral corrections that Claude discovers organically.

During checkpoint, do not capture items that auto memory already handles — user preferences, build commands, debugging shortcuts, code style. Focus on actionable work state.

During promote, decisions too small for a full ADR but worth persisting can be written into auto memory using its standard frontmatter format. Once written there, they are auto memory's responsibility; working does not re-modify them.

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files 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. yesterday First seen · 93 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A b2c6b1dfc121

Subscribe to this mod's changes

working is a skill published in the GitHub repository backchainai/backchain-plugins (4 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 1,183 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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