brain-taxonomist

brain-taxonomist is a skill for Claude Code from garrytan/gbrain. It costs 66 tokens per session (2,026 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A filing checkpoint that reads the current schema—the rules describing page types and folders—before a new brain page is created. It also checks periodically for pages that no longer fit their current location.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before creating any brain page to choose a repeatable filing path. It can also detect taxonomy drift and account for different rules when several brains or sources are used.
Why use it?
It removes the risk of storing information in the wrong folder or relying on outdated hard-coded filing rules. Unclear cases are surfaced for the user instead of being silently assigned.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; built for gbrain.

Part of the gbrain plugin — 44 skills, 2 plugins shipped together

Good fit Use it before creating any brain page to choose a repeatable filing path. It can also detect taxonomy drift and account for different rules when several brains or sources are used.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist
About the project

GBrain is a memory and retrieval layer for AI agents that searches, connects, and synthesizes information from stored sources. It is used to give coding agents and autonomous agents access to knowledge beyond their current code, including shared company information with access controls. The catalogue add-ons help agents operate GBrain and connect it to agent workflows.

garrytan/gbrain · 29,838 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 garrytan/gbrain --skill brain-taxonomist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install gbrain, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 44 skills, 2 plugins.

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 brain-taxonomist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist/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 brain-taxonomist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/brain-taxonomist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,026 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
  • Snyk pass 7 Sept 2026
  • 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 $0.00066 $0.02026
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.01013
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00405
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00203

Measured 12d ago against content hash dea4557b5408, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brain-taxonomist 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 12d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugin/skills/brain-taxonomist/SKILL.md · 196 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 196 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

brain-taxonomist

Purpose

Gate function: Before creating ANY new brain page, consult this skill to determine the correct filing path. This prevents misfiling at write time rather than cleaning up drift after the fact.

Drift function: Periodic scan for pages that have outgrown their current location.

Contract

This skill guarantees:

  • Every new page is filed at the path determined by the ACTIVE schema pack — never against a hardcoded directory table baked into this skill.
  • The decision is reproducible: invoking brain-taxonomist twice on the same content produces the same recommended path.
  • Ambiguous cases surface to the user via skills/ask-user/ rather than silently picking a default.
  • Per-source overrides via --source <id> are honored — multi-brain users (Persona B) get a different recommendation per source if their packs diverge.
  • When no matching page_types[] entry exists in the active pack, the skill signals to EIIRP Phase 3 (SCHEMA CHECK) rather than picking the closest-fitting fallback.

Critical: this skill reads the ACTIVE schema pack as data

brain-taxonomist has NO hardcoded directory table. Every decision is driven by gbrain schema show --json. This means:

  • A user who runs gbrain schema use gbrain-recommended gets the full recommended directory set (deal, meeting, concept, project, source, daily, personal, civic, original, place, trip, conversation, writing, plus all gbrain-base types).
  • A user who authored a custom pack via gbrain schema init + edit gets filing recommendations based on THEIR taxonomy, not gbrain's defaults.
  • Per-source overrides (tier 3 in the 7-tier resolution chain) are honored when --source <id> is passed to brain-taxonomist.

This is the single-source-of-truth principle (D9 from the v0.39 plan-eng-review).

When to Consult (MANDATORY)

Run the taxonomist check before writing to the brain in these cases:

  1. New brain page — any type (person, company, concept, book, meeting, etc.)
  2. Bulk import — before committing a batch of new pages
  3. Uncertain filing — when the primary subject is ambiguous

Read the full file on GitHub · 196 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 12d ago First seen · 196 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A dea4557b5408

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brain-taxonomist is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gbrain (29,838 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 2,026 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.

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