recon

recon is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from catcatcatstudio/cat-skills. It costs 114 tokens per session (3,722 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A pre-build decision brief that identifies the most important opportunities, risks, traps, and failure modes for a software project before its scope or technology choices are fixed.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before building a product or when asking what to watch out for, including focused questions such as authentication for software serving multiple organizations.
Why use it?
It helps teams make informed early decisions instead of discovering expensive problems after development has begun. The advice is adjusted for prototypes, production systems, and enterprise projects.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it before building a product or when asking what to watch out for, including focused questions such as authentication for software serving multiple organizations.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon
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 catcatcatstudio/cat-skills --skill recon
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills

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 recon

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

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 recon

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/catcatcatstudio/cat-skills/recon.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,722 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 $0.00114 $0.03722
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01861
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00744
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00372

Measured 9d ago against content hash 7a87f0fe5593, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

recon 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 9d 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.

.agents/skills/recon/SKILL.md · 278 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 278 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/recon — Pre-Build Decision Intelligence

What this skill produces

A decision brief — one opinionated document (~200 lines max) that reads like a 30-minute briefing from a senior consultant who's built 10 of these. Not a research report. Not a comprehensive survey. A ranked list of what actually matters for this project at this scope, with traps and edges treated as equal halves of the work.

The consultant's job has two sides:

  • Downside: what costs you if you get it wrong (traps, irreversible decisions, failure modes)
  • Upside: where the edge is that makes this an outlier (category-breaking moves, underused primitives, unfashionable advantages)

Recon does both, balanced. Pure worry is useless. Pure optimism is useless. Calibrated judgment is the product.

Modes

Mode Trigger Output
Full /recon or /recon [project description] Single decision brief + sources appendix
Focused /recon [specific question] Mini decision brief on that question

Distinguish by intent: "building a task management app" = full. "auth patterns for multi-tenant SaaS" = focused.


Phase 0: Orient and Calibrate Scope

Determine what to research from the argument, conversation context, open files, and project state.

Scope calibration — mandatory. Before any research, lock these down. This is what keeps recon from applying enterprise worries to prototypes (and enterprise aspirations to weekend hacks).

  • Scale: Prototype (weekend / single user / validating idea) / Production (real users, uptime matters) / Enterprise (scale, compliance, SLA)
  • Stakes: Reversible (can rebuild in a week) / Load-bearing (3-month rebuild cost) / Foundational (1+ year rebuild cost)
  • Timeline: Days / weeks / months to first ship
  • Irreversibility budget: How much "we'll figure it out later" can this project afford?

If any of these are unclear from context, ask ONE question to lock them:

"I see you're building [X]. Is this a prototype to validate the idea, a production system with real users, or something bigger? And what's the timeline?"

Read the full file on GitHub · 278 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 9d ago First seen · 278 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A 7a87f0fe5593

Subscribe to this mod's changes

recon is a skill published in the GitHub repository catcatcatstudio/cat-skills (3 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 3,722 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 2026-08-31.

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