Cairn Resume

Cairn Resume is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from CheswickDEV/cairn. It costs 65 tokens per session (370 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A resume workflow for continuing coding work from a saved Cairn decision ledger, which records accepted decisions, open questions, and next steps.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps restart paused tasks, load the latest handoff state, open only the relevant files, and save progress for the next handoff.
Why use it?
It avoids rereading an entire repository and losing track of earlier decisions when work resumes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the cairn plugin — 4 skills, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/cheswickdev/cairn/cairn-resume
Any agent
npx skills add CheswickDEV/cairn --skill cairn-resume
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CheswickDEV/cairn

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install cairn, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 Cairn Resume

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cheswickdev/cairn/cairn-resume.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cheswickdev/cairn/cairn-resume)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cheswickdev/cairn/cairn-resume"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cheswickdev/cairn/cairn-resume.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 370 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 $0.00065 $0.00370
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00185
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00074
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00037

Measured 4d ago against content hash c2db7669a386, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Cairn Resume 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 4d 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/cairn-resume/SKILL.md · 24 lines

What it actually says

Cairn resume — continue from the ledger, don't re-read the repo

Trigger: the user says "Cairn resume", or you are picking up prior work at the start of a task.

Do this:

  1. Call decision_log (view:"current") to re-inject the accepted + open decisions and the latest handoff brief.
  2. Treat that re-injected state as the authoritative source of truth. Continue from its NEXT STEPS.
  3. Do NOT re-read the repo wholesale — not ADR-cairn.md, not CHANGELOG.md, not the source tree. Open ONLY the specific files named in NEXT STEPS, or the files you are about to change. Re-reading the repo is exactly the context bloat the ledger exists to prevent — the brief is the trusted summary.
  4. Optional: call context_status to see the current zone (Codex has no statusline/hooks, so check it yourself; pass the host-reported model_context_window, e.g. 258400, as surfaceCap). If you need a value byte-exact that the brief references, pull its evidence with decision_log view:"all".

When you reach a natural stopping point, or the zone turns yellow/red, run "Cairn Handoff" (skill cairn-handoff) to persist progress.

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. 4d ago First seen · 24 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A c2db7669a386

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Cairn Resume is a skill published in the GitHub repository CheswickDEV/cairn (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 370 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.

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