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use-crystallized-brain

use-crystallized-brain is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bcharleson/crystallized-intelligence. It costs 56 tokens per session (837 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A retrieval guide for a curated knowledge collection, called a crystallized brain, that stores domain principles and supporting documents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to bootstrap a domain, search for relevant files, expand a question with ranked sources, or retrieve one specific document.
Why use it?
It helps retrieve only the relevant guidance instead of loading an entire knowledge base into the working context.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python tools/bin/brain.py domains.

not rated 5repo 5mo ago A scan 56 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to bootstrap a domain, search for relevant files, expand a question with ranked sources, or retrieve one specific document.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
View source ↗ bcharleson/crystallized-intelligence
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bcharleson/crystallized-intelligence
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bcharleson/crystallized-intelligence/use-crystallized-brain

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 use-crystallized-brain

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for use-crystallized-brain

Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 837 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00056 $0.00837
Opus 5.5 $0.00022 $0.00335
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00011 $0.00167
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00084

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 6e1316b3e61f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

use-crystallized-brain 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 1mo 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/use-crystallized-brain/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.

Use Crystallized Brain

Procedure for agents. The brain holds mastery; this skill holds how to retrieve it cheaply.

When to use

  • User or project has BRAIN_ROOT pointing at a brain (brain.yaml + corpus/)
  • MCP server exposes brain_bootstrap, brain_expand, brain_search, brain_get_document
  • Domain question needs curated knowledge, not a repo-wide file dump

Setup (once per machine)

export BRAIN_ROOT=/path/to/your-brain   # or examples/demo-brain in this repo

MCP: see docs/AGENT-INTEGRATION.md and docs/mcp-config.example.json.

Retrieval protocol (always follow)

  1. Bootstrap first — brain bootstrap <domain> or brain_bootstrap(domain)

    • Loads _crystal/seed.md + principles.md (~200–2.5K tokens)
    • Enough for orientation and most routine answers

  2. Expand only if needed — brain expand <domain> --query "..." --max-tokens 4000 --max-tier 3

    • Tier-ranked: lower source_tier wins (0 = first-party)
    • Default max_tier=3 unless user explicitly wants transcripts/social (4–5)

  3. Search for paths — brain search <domain> "keyword" when you need filenames, not full bodies

  4. Get one file — brain get <domain> <relative-path> for a single document

  5. Never read entire sources/ trees or bulk-load corpus/ into context

Conflict resolution

When documents disagree:

  1. Lower quality.source_tier (from frontmatter) wins
  2. Higher quality.verification wins (canonical > expert_verified > …)
  3. Higher quality.confidence wins
  4. Prefer _crystal/ over knowledge/ over sources/ for operational answers

CLI examples

python tools/bin/brain.py domains
python tools/bin/brain.py bootstrap specialty-coffee
python tools/bin/brain.py bootstrap b2b-discovery
python tools/bin/brain.py expand b2b-discovery --query "disqualify" --max-tokens 4000 --max-tier 3
python tools/bin/brain.py search b2b-discovery "qualification"

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 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. 1mo ago First seen · 93 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 6e1316b3e61f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

use-crystallized-brain is a skill published in the GitHub repository bcharleson/crystallized-intelligence (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 837 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Memory and context
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