prior-work-retrieval

prior-work-retrieval is a skill for Claude Code from daymade/claude-code-skills. It costs 173 tokens per session (3,018 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A read-only process for finding and checking earlier work before starting a substantial task. It records which existing material should be reused or adapted and what still needs to be created.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing prior code, procedures, decisions, or other project records when the user explicitly asks to reuse earlier work or history.
Why use it?
It reduces duplicate work and prevents treating an unverified search result as the current or correct source.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the daymade-claude-code plugin — 19 skills shipped together

Good fit Reviewing prior code, procedures, decisions, or other project records when the user explicitly asks to reuse earlier work or history.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/prior-work-retrieval
About the project

Claude Code Skills Marketplace is a collection and marketplace of skills, plugins, agents, and instructions that extend Claude Code with specialized development workflows. It is for developers who want to install existing workflows or create, validate, and package their own Claude Code skills.

daymade/claude-code-skills · 1,381 stars · on GitHub

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 daymade/claude-code-skills --skill prior-work-retrieval
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/daymade/claude-code-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install daymade-claude-code, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills.

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 prior-work-retrieval

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/prior-work-retrieval.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/prior-work-retrieval)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/prior-work-retrieval"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/daymade/claude-code-skills/prior-work-retrieval.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 173 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,018 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 $0.00173 $0.03018
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.01509
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00604
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00302

Measured 5d ago against content hash 4a97b0ae0fb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prior-work-retrieval 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/prior_work_hook.py, scripts/prior_work.py, scripts/prior-work-retrieval.sh, …), 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.

daymade-claude-code/prior-work-retrieval/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prior Work Retrieval

Run this before substantial production only when the trigger above is present. Read-only current-state checks stay direct unless the user asks for history. Its job is not to generate another summary. Its job is to answer: what already exists, which source is current, what should be reused, and what remains genuinely new?

Completion contract

A retrieval pass is complete only when all five are true:

  1. The task's real business outcome is written as one sentence.
  2. Every relevant carrier declared in the manifest reports searched, manual_completed, or an explicit failure/coverage gap.
  3. Candidate claims are opened at their original path or record, not accepted from a search snippet alone.
  4. Each adopted item has a reuse or adapt decision and a reason tied to the current task. If nothing is adopted, the receipt carries a concrete no_reuse_reason.
  5. scripts/prior_work.py check accepts the receipt for this session.

retrieved is not verified; verified is not reused. Keep those states separate so “I searched” cannot impersonate “I used our best prior work.”

Workflow

1. Read the local operating context first

Before querying, read the current project's AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md, navigation index, and any North Star/current-decision file they name. Historical material cannot override a newer explicit decision.

2. Validate the explicit source manifest

The manifest is the only discovery scope. No directory exists merely because a convention says it should. Default path:

uv run --no-project python scripts/prior_work.py \
  --manifest <path> validate-manifest

The default is ~/.config/daymade/prior-work/sources.json; a project may pin another path. Global options precede the subcommand. The schema and carrier examples are in references/source-manifest.md.

3. Retrieve across declared carriers

Write the user-world outcome separately from the proposed implementation. Then provide two term sets:

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 5d ago Changed · +5 lines 4a97b0ae0fb6
  2. 8d ago First seen · 263 lines · 173 tokens per session scan A 7e8ad45817eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prior-work-retrieval is a skill published in the GitHub repository daymade/claude-code-skills (1,381 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 173 tokens to every session and 3,018 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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