ISA

ISA is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from danielmiessler/LifeOS. It costs 115 tokens per session (6,657 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A project record that describes the desired finished state of a task or product. It can be created, refined through questions, checked for completeness, and updated with decisions and verification notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape an unclear idea, record project requirements, compare feature notes with the main plan, start from an existing code repository, and document decisions.
Why use it?
It gives everyone one place to define what “done” means and track how that definition changes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/danielmiessler/lifeos/isa
Any agent
npx skills add danielmiessler/LifeOS --skill isa
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS

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 ISA

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/isa.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/isa)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/isa"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/danielmiessler/lifeos/isa.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,657 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00115 $0.06657
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.03328
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.01331
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00666

Measured 4d ago against content hash 3e5745ccdb63, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ISA scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
LifeOS/install/skills/ISA/SKILL.md · 245 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 245 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

🚨 MANDATORY: Voice Notification (REQUIRED BEFORE ANY ACTION)

You MUST send this notification BEFORE doing anything else when this skill is invoked.

  1. Send voice notification:

    curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"message": "Running the WORKFLOWNAME workflow in the ISA skill"}' \
      > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    
  2. Output text notification:

    Running the **WorkflowName** workflow in the **ISA** skill to ACTION...
    

This is not optional. Execute this curl command immediately upon skill invocation.

ISA — Ideal State Artifact

What It Does

The ISA is the single document that articulates "done" for any thing whose ideal state we are pursuing — a project, an application, a library, infrastructure, a work session, an art piece, a strategic decision. It serves five identities at once: ideal state articulation, test harness, build verification, done condition, system of record. This skill owns the canonical template, the workflows that generate and refine ISAs, and the example library.

Every ISA shares one meta-ideal-state above its specific one: euphoric surprise in the human using the system. The specific ideal state varies with the work; the universal one never does. ## Vision is where that general target takes specific shape — what euphoric surprise looks like for this particular work — so every ISA hill-climbs toward two summits at once.

The Problem

Most work starts without a written, testable definition of what finished looks like, so "done" drifts — the goal in your head at the start isn't the goal you settle for at the end, and there's no record of which one was right. Criteria stay vague enough that anything passes, decisions and dead ends get forgotten and re-litigated, and when work spans multiple sessions or multiple agents there's no shared source of truth for what's been verified. The ISA fixes "done" as a hard-to-vary explanation with atomic, probe-able criteria, a stable-ID structure that survives edits, and an audit trail of what was conjectured, refuted, and learned.

Read the full file on GitHub · 245 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. 4d ago First seen · 245 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A 3e5745ccdb63

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ISA is a skill published in the GitHub repository danielmiessler/LifeOS (18,865 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 115 tokens to every session and 6,657 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories