OSS Contribution Best Practices

OSS Contribution Best Practices is a skill for Claude Code from costajohnt/oss-autopilot. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,649 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

General guidance for contributing to open-source software, including respectful communication, project guidelines, patience, and focused changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when preparing contributions, working on issues, responding to maintainers, writing pull requests, or deciding which contribution-specific guidance applies.
Why use it?
It helps contributors work with maintainers effectively and avoid wasting review time with unclear, oversized, or unrelated changes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the oss-autopilot plugin — 3 skills, 9 commands, 8 agents, 2 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it when preparing contributions, working on issues, responding to maintainers, writing pull requests, or deciding which contribution-specific guidance applies.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution
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 costajohnt/oss-autopilot --skill oss-contribution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/costajohnt/oss-autopilot

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-autopilot, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 9 commands, 8 agents, 2 MCP servers.

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 OSS Contribution Best Practices

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution/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 OSS Contribution Best Practices

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/oss-contribution.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,649 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 $0.00052 $0.01649
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00825
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00330
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00165

Measured 10d ago against content hash c1d0ce319af7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

OSS Contribution Best Practices 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.

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.

skills/oss-contribution/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Open Source Contribution Best Practices

Reference: Based on opensource.guide

This skill is the index. The detail topics live in two sibling skills that load on demand:

  • pr-etiquette — responding to code review feedback, writing PR descriptions, dormant-PR follow-up cadence, PR quality checklist, communication etiquette.
  • contribution-ethics — AI attribution rules, AI-tell avoidance in maintainer-visible writing, when to defer to a human.

Both are linked below. Use this file for the universal rules that apply to every contribution regardless of stage; jump to the sibling skills when you're at a specific stage in the cycle.

Core Principles

Be a good open source citizen:

  1. Respect maintainers' time — they're often unpaid volunteers
  2. Read contribution guidelines before contributing
  3. Communicate clearly and professionally
  4. Be patient — open source moves at its own pace
  5. Give back to the community when you can

Minimal Diff Discipline

Every line in a PR diff must be directly related to the issue being fixed. Unrelated formatting changes (whitespace, quote style, trailing commas, import reordering, line breaks) make diffs noisy, harder to review, and signal carelessness. Maintainers will flag or reject PRs with formatting bloat.

Rules:

  1. Only touch lines the fix requires. Don't reorder imports, change quote styles, fix whitespace, or add trailing commas in existing code — unless those changes are part of the fix itself.
  2. Scope formatter output. If the repo's formatter must be run (e.g., CI requires it), review the formatter's changes afterward. Use git diff to identify formatting-only changes. Use git checkout -- {files} only for files where ALL changes are formatting-only. For files with mixed changes, use targeted edits to surgically remove formatting hunks. (In interactive terminal contexts, git add -p can also be used for hunk-level staging.)
  3. Match the repo's style, don't impose your own. If the repo uses single quotes, use single quotes in your new code. If it uses tabs, use tabs. Never convert existing style to a different one.

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 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 · 130 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A c1d0ce319af7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

OSS Contribution Best Practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository costajohnt/oss-autopilot (13 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,649 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 2026-08-30.