idea-first

idea-first is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bearded-illirian/trailmark. It costs 117 tokens per session (2,344 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A questioning step that clarifies a new software task before technical work begins. It classifies the task as a product idea, feature, or fix and chooses the next workflow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a task to answer discovery questions, agree on the scope, and route the work to product planning, feature architecture, or bug investigation.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of solving the wrong problem or applying a technical process that does not fit the task.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents); $skill-name invocation.

Good fit Use it at the start of a task to answer discovery questions, agree on the scope, and route the work to product planning, feature architecture, or bug investigation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bearded-illirian/trailmark/idea-first
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.

Any agent
npx skills add bearded-illirian/trailmark --skill idea-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bearded-illirian/trailmark

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 idea-first

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bearded-illirian/trailmark/idea-first.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bearded-illirian/trailmark/idea-first)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bearded-illirian/trailmark/idea-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bearded-illirian/trailmark/idea-first.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,344 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to low

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • low Excessive Agency · line 128
    Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
    Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00117 $0.02344
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01172
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00469
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00234

Measured 3d ago against content hash b7c7b77c8ac8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

idea-first 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.

adapters/codex/.agents/skills/idea-first/SKILL.md · 282 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 282 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Idea-First Protocol

Idea-first is the entry point of the self-organizing skill chain. Runs right after the task is created, before any technical analysis.

Why: without an explicit definition of the task type the next skills are built on guesses — arch-first decomposes a fix into blocks when audit-first was needed, library-first looks in a non-existent layer, the agent goes into code when habit design is required.

Idea-first closes this gap with a 5-10 minute dialog.

Key principle: idea-first does not read code — it determines the task type through dialog. Code is read by the next skills.

Input

A new task description just registered by the fast-track flow.

Output

idea-first-{N}.md fixing the task type (product / feature / fix) and scope, after 5-7 discovery questions and user approval.

Hands off to

habit-first (product), arch-first (feature), or audit-first (fix), based on the classified type.


Step 0 — Check task context

Ensure {log_dir} and {slug} are known.

If not — run resolver (list recent tasks, prompt user), then continue.

Cannot skip. Without {log_dir} the artifact will not be saved.


Step 0.5 — Hot-fix exception

If the task is an obvious small edit (one line, a typo, a known problem with a known fix) — skip all of idea-first and go straight to execute.

Signs of a hot-fix

Sign Example
One line / one value Change timeout from 30 to 60 sec
Typo / formatting Fix a typo in a button label
Known fix for a known problem Remove a duplicate in SQL you added yourself
Time to complete < 5 minutes

What to output

Looks like a hot-fix — one line / obvious edit.
Skipping idea-first → going straight to execute.
If more complex than it looks — say "stop" and we'll launch idea-first.

Then 3 short steps:

  1. Register block 1 in task_blocks — hot-fix = one task = one block. atom_type='manual', source='idea-first'. INSERT OR IGNORE guards repeats.
  2. Execute — Claude does the edit manually (Read / Edit / Bash). After completion — commit + push, remember {last_commit_hash}.
  3. Finalize via $ship-first task-level — invoke WITHOUT {block_num} → activates task-level mode: closes block 1, updates STATUS.md, appends sessions.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 282 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. 3d ago Changed b7c7b77c8ac8
  2. 8d ago First seen · 282 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 042d79441d60

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository bearded-illirian/trailmark (19 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 2,344 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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