study-repo

A process for studying an external software repository to understand its architecture, patterns, and design choices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect a cloned public or private repository, focus on areas such as testing or MCP integration, and write an influence document plus improvements.md updates.
Why use it?
It turns another project’s structure into documented ideas and prioritized recommendations for the project being improved.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the claude-memory plugin — 14 skills, 6 commands, 6 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/codenamev/claude_memory/study-repo
Any agent
npx skills add codenamev/claude_memory --skill study-repo
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/codenamev/claude_memory

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install claude-memory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills, 6 commands, 6 hooks, 1 MCP server.

Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,596 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 $0.00031 $0.02596
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01298
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00519
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00260

Measured 3d ago against content hash e125fc57c6ab, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

study-repo 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.

.claude/skills/study-repo/SKILL.md · 323 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 323 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repository Study Skill

Deep analysis of external repositories to identify patterns, architecture decisions, and opportunities for adoption in ClaudeMemory.

Prerequisites

Before running this skill, clone the repository you want to study:

# For public repos
git clone https://github.com/user/project /tmp/study-repos/project-name

# For private repos (requires gh CLI)
gh repo clone user/project /tmp/study-repos/project-name

# Use --depth 1 for speed (recommended)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/user/project /tmp/study-repos/project-name

Then invoke: /study-repo /tmp/study-repos/project-name

Optional Focus Mode: Narrow analysis to specific aspect

/study-repo /tmp/study-repos/project-name --focus="MCP implementation"
/study-repo /tmp/study-repos/project-name --focus="testing strategy"

See .claude/skills/study-repo/focus-examples.md for more examples.

CRITICAL: Memory Discipline (no external-tech misattribution)

When studying an external repo you will read its README, gemspec, and source — and you will see things like "uses Postgres", "runs on AWS", "built with Rails". These are facts about the external project, not about this project.

Do NOT call memory.store_extraction with the external project's tech stack as uses_database / uses_framework / uses_language / deployment_platform / auth_method predicates. That misattribution caused 27 facts to be stored about ClaudeMemory in the 2026-04-23/24 window that all had to be hand-rejected (see improvements.md #61, quality_review.md 2026-04-30 note). The corpus damage was real even though the cleanup worked — every misattributed fact takes a round trip through the database, conflict-detection, and the user's claude-memory reject queue.

The rule. While /study-repo is running, the only memory.store_extraction calls allowed are:

  • predicate=reference for descriptions of the external project ("X is a plugin/library/CLI that…"). The dashboard's Knowledge → References panel is the right home for these.
  • Facts genuinely about this project ClaudeMemory that you derive from contrast with the studied repo (e.g., a decision: "Adopt RRF fusion from QMD because…"). These belong as decision / convention / architecture with subject=repo or subject=claude_memory AND a reason clause embedded.

Read the full file on GitHub · 323 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. 3d ago First seen · 323 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e125fc57c6ab

Subscribe to this mod's changes

study-repo is a skill published in the GitHub repository codenamev/claude_memory (24 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,596 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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