pickup

A workflow for resuming work from a handoff file created in an earlier session.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps locate the correct handoff, compare its worktree and branch with the current ones, recover the previous session's instructions, and identify failed approaches or open questions.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of continuing from the wrong project state, branch, or incomplete understanding of previous work.

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/baleen37/bstack/pickup
Any agent
npx skills add baleen37/bstack --skill pickup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/baleen37/bstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,821 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 $0.00069 $0.01821
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00911
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00364
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00182

Measured yesterday against content hash ffc5f947d42d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pickup 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.

plugins/me/skills/pickup/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/pickup: Resume from a handoff file

Read a handoff written by /handoff and continue the previous session's work. Pair with /handoff.

The hard part is not finding the directory — Claude can do that. The hard part is not silently picking the wrong file, not summarizing the Resume Prompt away, and not papering over a worktree/branch mismatch with inference. This skill exists to enforce that discipline.

What /pickup does

  • Lists candidates from ~/.claude/handoff/
  • If multiple candidates exist, asks the user to pick (never auto-matches by topic/branch)
  • Reads the chosen file
  • Compares its worktree and branch to the current ones, reports any mismatch, and stops to ask before proceeding when they differ
  • Quotes the Resume Prompt verbatim in a code block — never paraphrased
  • Surfaces Failed Approaches and Open Questions
  • Cross-checks the handoff against git log since the handoff was written, and reports any work that may already be done
  • Then continues using the recovered context

What /pickup does NOT do

  • Does not write or modify files
  • Does not auto-checkout branches or change worktrees
  • Does not pick a file by topic match, branch name, or recency alone when multiple files exist
  • Does not summarize, paraphrase, or "improve" the Resume Prompt
  • Does not search project-local directories — only ~/.claude/handoff/
  • Does not silently skip Failed Approaches even when they look outdated

Steps

  1. List candidates (newest first):

    ls -t ~/.claude/handoff/*.md 2>/dev/null | head -10
    

    If empty/missing → tell the user there is nothing to pick up. Stop. Do not fabricate context from git log.

  2. Choose a file — strict rules:

    • 0 candidates → stop (above).
    • 1 candidate → use it.
    • 2+ candidates → use AskUserQuestion (load via ToolSearch if it's a deferred tool: ToolSearch select:AskUserQuestion; if unavailable, ask inline). Show top 5 with <filename> — <first-line title>. Never auto-pick by branch name match, topic match, or "most recent." The user picks.
    • If the user's request named a topic, you may suggest a default in the question, but the user still confirms.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 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. yesterday First seen · 133 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A ffc5f947d42d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pickup is a skill published in the GitHub repository baleen37/bstack (4 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 1,821 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens