parent-updates

parent-updates is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from datatorag/mcp-gateway. It costs 63 tokens per session (1,032 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A rule for sending important progress, decisions, blockers, and corrections from a child coding session to its parent session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when work finishes, a decision is needed, a blocker appears, or an assumption in the assigned brief proves wrong.
Why use it?
It prevents the parent session from missing work or discoveries because it cannot see the child session's tool output.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the datatorag plugin — 16 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook 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/datatorag/mcp-gateway/parent-updates
Any agent
npx skills add datatorag/mcp-gateway --skill parent-updates
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/datatorag/mcp-gateway

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install datatorag, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

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 parent-updates

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/datatorag/mcp-gateway/parent-updates.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/datatorag/mcp-gateway/parent-updates)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/datatorag/mcp-gateway/parent-updates"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/datatorag/mcp-gateway/parent-updates.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,032 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 $0.00063 $0.01032
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00516
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00206
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00103

Measured 5d ago against content hash 9c04ef4f57ba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

parent-updates 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 5d 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/parent-updates/SKILL.md · 93 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 93 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Parent Updates

This session runs as an AgentDeck child of datatorag-hq. HQ writes the briefs and owns the decisions, but it cannot see anything in this session — not the tool calls, not the test output, not the thing you just discovered that invalidates its brief. The only channel is an explicit send.

agent-deck session send datatorag-hq "..."

SendMessage does not reach it. It has to be this command.

When to send

Send at these moments, not on a timer:

  1. Work lands. A build finishes, a gate passes, a push goes out, a deploy completes. Include what was verified and how, not just that it is done.
  2. A decision is needed. Anything where proceeding either way is defensible and the choice is HQ's. Send the options and a recommendation, then keep building whatever does not depend on the answer.
  3. A blocker appears. Say what is blocked, what it is blocked on, and whose action unblocks it.
  4. A brief's premise turns out to be wrong. This is the highest-value send and the easiest to skip. If HQ says a tenant is suspended and it is not, or hedges on something that is not a maybe, correcting it early is worth more than the work you were asked to do.
  5. Something durable is learned. A defect, an API constraint, a false-negative trap. HQ stores these; this session's context does not survive.

Do NOT send a running commentary. A send that says "starting on X" costs HQ attention and tells it nothing it cannot infer.

What a good send contains

  • The verdict first. Done, blocked, or needs a decision.
  • What was verified, and how. "327 tests passing, cache-busted with cf-cache-status DYNAMIC" beats "verified". HQ is deciding whether to trust the result; give it the basis.
  • Corrections, plainly. If you were wrong earlier, or HQ was, say which and what the right answer is. Do not bury it.
  • What is still outstanding, so HQ can sequence the next brief.
  • Cleanup owed by a human — a test ticket that cannot be deleted by tool, a throwaway file, a console action.

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 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. 5d ago First seen · 93 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A 9c04ef4f57ba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

parent-updates is a skill published in the GitHub repository datatorag/mcp-gateway (3 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 1,032 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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