investigating-repository-history

investigating-repository-history is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from CodeAlive-AI/ai-driven-development. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,776 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A Git history investigation guide for understanding why existing code was written a certain way. Git records changes to a codebase, while GitHub often contains the pull requests and review discussions behind them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before changing APIs, security checks, migrations, concurrency code, performance-sensitive code, feature flags, or unclear legacy workarounds.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unsafe edits by uncovering the original intent, compatibility requirements, rejected alternatives, and earlier fixes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: allowed-tools in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the ai-driven-development plugin — 24 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it before changing APIs, security checks, migrations, concurrency code, performance-sensitive code, feature flags, or unclear legacy workarounds.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history
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 CodeAlive-AI/ai-driven-development --skill investigating-repository-history
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CodeAlive-AI/ai-driven-development

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ai-driven-development, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills, 1 agent.

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 investigating-repository-history

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history/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 investigating-repository-history

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/codealive-ai/ai-driven-development/investigating-repository-history.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,776 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
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 $0.00084 $0.01776
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00888
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00355
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00178

Measured 10d ago against content hash 8dd137259143, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigating-repository-history 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/compact_pr.py, scripts/history_context.py, scripts/validate_skill.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/investigating-repository-history/SKILL.md · 166 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repository History Investigator

Use this skill to reconstruct the historical intent behind code before changing it. The goal is not merely “find the blame commit”; the goal is to return a compact, cited history note explaining relevant PRs, review comments, constraints, rejected approaches, and anomalies.

Contents

Trigger conditions

Use this skill when the user asks any of these:

  • “Why is this code written this way?”
  • “Can I remove/simplify/change this check, constraint, branch, migration, public API, or feature flag?”
  • “Which PR introduced this behavior or regression?”
  • “Find the relevant PR/review discussion/history for this code.”
  • Before editing code that touches API compatibility, security, concurrency, persistence, migrations, performance, generated interfaces, feature flags, or unclear legacy/workaround logic.

Do not use this skill for trivial new code with no dependency on existing behavior.

Core rule

Before making a risky edit, produce a history note answering:

  1. What code scope was inspected?
  2. Which commits and PRs are relevant?
  3. Which review comments or PR discussions explain intent?
  4. What constraints, risks, rejected approaches, or tests were found?
  5. Is the evidence strong, weak, contradictory, stale, truncated, or unknown?
  6. How should the implementation plan change?

If the evidence is weak, say UNKNOWN and lower confidence. Never invent intent from a semantic match alone.

Fast path

From the repository working tree, run the collector first. If the skill directory is not the current directory, prefix the script path with the installed skill path and pass --repo-dir /path/to/repo.

Read the full file on GitHub · 166 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. 10d ago First seen · 166 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 8dd137259143

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigating-repository-history is a skill published in the GitHub repository CodeAlive-AI/ai-driven-development (132 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,776 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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