validate-readme

A checker for README files, which are project documentation pages commonly stored as README.md. It verifies required sections, installation code blocks, optional content, and a quality score.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find README files, check their structure, assess purpose and usage guidance, and identify the most important documentation gap.
Why use it?
It reveals missing setup instructions or weak documentation before the repository is handed to other developers.

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/dryvist/claude-code-plugins/validate-readme
Any agent
npx skills add dryvist/claude-code-plugins --skill validate-readme
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dryvist/claude-code-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 820 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 $0.00072 $0.00820
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00410
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00164
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00082

Measured 2d ago against content hash 119a5db371a8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

validate-readme 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 2d 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.

content-guards/skills/validate-readme/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Validate README

Run a comprehensive audit of all README.md files in the current repository.

Usage

/validate-readme

Steps

1. Find all README files

Find all README*.md files in the repository, excluding .git/ and .claude/ directories.

2. Validate each README

For each README found, check:

  • Required sections present (from .readme-validator.yaml or defaults)
  • Installation section contains at least one code block
  • Optional sections present (warnings only)

Badge URL reachability may be checked on-demand using WebFetch for any badge images found in the README.

3. Score quality

Section presence is a floor, not a measure of quality — a README can carry every required heading and still tell a reader nothing. Score each README 0-6 against these checks and report the score alongside the pass/warn status. The lowest- numbered failing check is the file's gap: the one thing most worth fixing.

# Check Pass condition
1 Exists README.md present at the directory root
2 Purpose paragraph First non-frontmatter, non-badge, non-heading paragraph is prose stating what the project does — at least 30 and at most 500 characters, not starting with a list bullet
3 Quickstart A ## Quick Start, ## Install, ## Installation, ## Getting Started, or ## Setup section appears within the first 80 lines
4 Usage examples A ## Usage, ## Examples, or ## Example section — or the Quickstart — contains a code block of at least 3 lines
5 License A ## License section, or a license badge linking to LICENSE / LICENSE.md
6 Length Between 30 and 400 non-blank lines — below is a stub, above is a manual that should be split out

Check 2 is the one that most often fails on a README that passes section validation, and it is usually the most valuable to fix: a reader who cannot tell what a project does from its opening paragraph will not read the rest.

Scope note: repo description and CLAUDE.md quality travel with README quality but are not README checks. Leave them to the tools that own those files — claude-md-improver (claude-md-management) covers CLAUDE.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 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. 2d ago First seen · 96 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 119a5db371a8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

validate-readme is a skill published in the GitHub repository dryvist/claude-code-plugins (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 820 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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