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.
npx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gbrain/cold-startnpx skills add garrytan/gbrain --skill cold-startgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gbrainWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/cold-start)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/cold-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/cold-start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00094 | $0.05255 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00047 | $0.02627 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00019 | $0.01051 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00526 |
Grade A, and why
cold-start 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 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.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 546 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cold Start — Day-One Brain Bootstrapping
You have a working brain. Search works. Now what?
An empty brain is a static database. A brain with your email history, calendar, contacts, conversations, and social media is a live context membrane that makes every future interaction smarter. This skill sequences the highest-leverage data sources to get you from zero to useful in one session.
Contract
- Every import phase is gated on user consent (ask-user pattern) before proceeding.
- The agent never holds raw OAuth tokens or API keys. This is a safety
requirement, not a preference. Three paths satisfy it for Google data:
the native connector (
gbrain google setup— tokens live in gbrain's credential vault, mode 0600, never in the agent's context; seedocs/guides/google-connect.mdandskills/google-loops/SKILL.md), ClawVisor (a hosted credential gateway that vaults credentials, enforces task-scoped authorization, logs every API call, and requires human approval for destructive operations — needs a harness with the integration), or offline file exports (Google Takeout, Twitter archive download). - Each phase is independently valuable — the user can stop after any phase and still have a useful brain.
- Progress is tracked in
~/.gbrain/cold-start-state.jsonso interrupted sessions can resume. - Entity detection and cross-linking run on every import, not as a separate pass.
Prerequisites
- GBrain installed and initialized (
gbrain doctor --jsonall green) - Brain repo cloned and synced
- Agent has terminal access and can run
gbrainCLI commands
The Priority Stack
Data sources ranked by information density × ease of import:
| Priority | Source | Why | Time | Pages Created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Existing markdown/Obsidian | Highest density — it's already structured | 5 min | 100s-1000s |
| 2 | Google Contacts | Seeds the people/ directory — names, emails, companies | 10 min | 50-500 |
| 3 | Google Calendar (90 days) | Meeting history with attendee context | 15 min | 30-90 |
| 4 | Gmail (recent threads) | Relationship context, active threads, org chart signals | 20 min | 50-200 |
| 5 | Conversations (ChatGPT/Claude exports) | Your thinking, questions, mental models | 15 min | 10-100 |
| 6 | X/Twitter archive | Your public positions, takes, engagement patterns | 20 min | 30-365 |
| 7 | File archives (Dropbox/Drive/local) | Historical documents, old writing, photos | 30+ min | varies |
| 8 | Meeting transcripts (Circleback/etc.) | Deep relationship context from recorded calls | 20 min | 10-50 |
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 546 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A d5ba53bb2fe9
cold-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gbrain (29,539 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 5,255 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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