idea-lineage

idea-lineage is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from garrytan/gbrain. It costs 60 tokens per session (2,001 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research method for tracing how one idea changed over time in a knowledge base, from its first mention to its current form.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find an idea's origin, strongest explanation, related concepts, rejected branches, and currently active version.
Why use it?
It separates an idea's development, reversals, contradictions, and abandoned versions instead of treating every mention as the same.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is **Convention:** see [conventions/quality.md](../conventions/quality.md) for.

Part of the gbrain-coding plugin — 20 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to find an idea's origin, strongest explanation, related concepts, rejected branches, and currently active version.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
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 · 29,702 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/garrytan/gbrain/idea-lineage

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install gbrain-coding, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 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 idea-lineage

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/idea-lineage.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/idea-lineage)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/garrytan/gbrain/idea-lineage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/garrytan/gbrain/idea-lineage.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,001 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Agent Snooping · line 71
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 208
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 209
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
  • medium Agent Snooping · line 210
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 $0.00060 $0.02001
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.01001
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00400
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00200

Measured 8d ago against content hash bbf37781d93b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

idea-lineage 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 8d 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

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugin-variants/gbrain-coding/skills/idea-lineage/SKILL.md · 223 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

idea-lineage - Single-Idea Evolution Through the Brain

Convention: see conventions/quality.md for citation rules, quote fidelity, and source-backed claims.

Boundary: see docs/takes-vs-facts.md for the distinction between holder-attributed takes and the brain owner's hot facts. Do not collapse those layers when summarizing lineage.

What this solves

Users often want to understand how one idea changed across time: when it first appeared, when it became sharp, what it displaced, what it contradicted, and what version is alive now. That is different from building a whole concept map and different from charting an entity's metric trajectory.

Use this skill when the user asks about one idea, topic, phrase, or concept page and wants its evolution through the brain.

Canonical examples:

  • "Run idea lineage on founder-led sales."
  • "How has my thinking about compounding trust changed?"
  • "What is my current version of this idea?"
  • "Where did this idea come from, and what did I abandon along the way?"

What this is not

  • Not concept-synthesis: that skill deduplicates many concept stubs, tiers them, writes concept pages, and builds a broad intellectual map.
  • Not find_trajectory: that operation charts typed facts or event rows for an entity, such as MRR, role, location, or status over time.
  • Not a contradiction-probe runner: this skill may read cached contradiction findings when available, but it does not launch expensive probes.
  • Not a writing mode by default: do not write a lineage page unless the user explicitly asks for a saved artifact after seeing the read-only answer.

Contract

This skill guarantees:

  • A single-idea scope is preserved. Broad corpus or "map my concepts" prompts route to skills/concept-synthesis/SKILL.md instead.
  • Every lineage claim cites existing brain evidence: page slug, source id when present, date, and short quote or snippet.
  • Missing evidence is labeled as a gap, not patched with plausible narrative.
  • Contradictions, reversals, and abandoned branches are separated from normal temporal evolution.
  • The default mode is read-only and does not mutate brain pages.

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 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. 8d ago First seen · 223 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A bbf37781d93b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-lineage is a skill published in the GitHub repository garrytan/gbrain (29,702 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 2,001 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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