diff

A branch-difference analyzer that compares your current branch with the point where it split from main, called the merge-base. It shows the changes belonging to your branch without including later changes made on main.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to view changed-file statistics, the full patch, changed files, branch commits, or files shared with another branch.
Why use it?
Comparing directly with main can include unrelated progress from main and make the result noisy. Using the merge-base gives a clearer view of your branch's own 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/brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap/diff
Any agent
npx skills add brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap --skill diff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 472 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 $0.00037 $0.00472
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00236
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00094
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00047

Measured yesterday against content hash 34a0b08d632a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diff 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.

.claude/skills/diff/SKILL.md · 57 lines

What it actually says

Diff Skill

Analyze the current branch's diff against its merge-base with main.

Usage

/diff             # Stat overview (default)
/diff full        # Full patch output
/diff files       # List changed files only
/diff commits     # List commits on this branch
/diff overlap feature/other-branch  # Check for file overlap with another branch

⚠️ Critical: Always Use Merge-Base

# CORRECT — only shows YOUR changes
git diff $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD

# WRONG — includes main's forward progress as noise
git diff main

Instructions

Determine action from $ARGUMENTS:

Argument Action
stat or (empty) git --no-pager diff $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD --stat
full git --no-pager diff $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD | head -200
files git --no-pager diff $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD --name-only
commits git --no-pager log $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD --oneline
overlap <branch> Cross-branch file overlap check (see below)

Cross-Branch Overlap Check:

BRANCH_A_FILES=$(git --no-pager diff $(git merge-base main HEAD)..HEAD --name-only)
BRANCH_B_FILES=$(git --no-pager diff $(git merge-base main <other-branch>)..<other-branch> --name-only)
# Show files that appear in both
comm -12 <(echo "$BRANCH_A_FILES" | sort) <(echo "$BRANCH_B_FILES" | sort)

Report Format

For stat/default mode, report:

  1. Files changed (count)
  2. Lines added / removed
  3. Any files that look unexpectedly large (>200 lines changed)
  4. Any test files missing for changed source files
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 · 57 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 34a0b08d632a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diff is a skill published in the GitHub repository brain-bootstrap/claude-code-brain-bootstrap (11 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 472 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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