orienting-to-repo

orienting-to-repo is a skill for Claude Code from gg-mo/repo-hygiene. It costs 57 tokens per session (914 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A starting procedure for understanding an unfamiliar code repository—a project folder containing its source code, configuration, documentation, and tests—before making substantial changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect the README, package or build files, directory structure, and project conventions before changing business logic, public APIs, builds, or infrastructure.
Why use it?
Searching for one symbol too early can hide the project's purpose, technology choices, layout, or competing implementations.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the repo-hygiene plugin — 9 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to inspect the README, package or build files, directory structure, and project conventions before changing business logic, public APIs, builds, or infrastructure.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo
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 gg-mo/repo-hygiene --skill orienting-to-repo
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gg-mo/repo-hygiene

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install repo-hygiene, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills, 1 hook.

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 orienting-to-repo

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo/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 orienting-to-repo

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gg-mo/repo-hygiene/orienting-to-repo.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 914 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.
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 $0.00057 $0.00914
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00457
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00183
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00091

Measured 12d ago against content hash c55e214d8a85, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

orienting-to-repo 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.

skills/orienting-to-repo/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Orienting to a Repo

Overview

Before substantive work in a repo you don't already understand, build a brief mental model. Jumping to task-specific grep is a trap: you find symbol X without learning that symbol X is one of three competing implementations and the project is mid-migration. Five minutes of orientation prevents an hour of wrong-direction work.

Core principle: Understand what the repo IS before you change it.

When to Use

  • First substantive change in a repo you haven't worked in this session
  • After a /clear or /compact in a repo
  • Task touches business logic, public API, build config, or CI

When NOT to Use

  • One-line typo fix
  • Renaming a single local variable
  • Already oriented in this session (rely on conversation context)
  • User explicitly says "skip orientation"

The Orientation Pass

Run these in parallel where possible. Time-box to ~5 minutes, not 30.

  1. Purpose — Read README.md (intro + setup section). What does this repo DO?
  2. Stack — Read package.json / pyproject.toml / go.mod / Gemfile / Cargo.toml. Language, framework, key deps.
  3. Layoutls the root and 1-2 levels into the main source dir. Note convention: src/, lib/, app/, pkg/, etc.
  4. Conventions — Look for CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, .editorconfig, linter configs. These are the rules.
  5. Tests — Where do they live? What runner? Read one test file to see the style.
  6. CI / build — Skim .github/workflows/ or equivalent. What's enforced before merge?
  7. Entry point — Find and read the main entry file (top of main.py, index.ts, cmd/<name>/main.go).

Capture the Model — Briefly

After the pass, write a short scratch summary (3-5 bullets) in your reply to the user. Cover:

  • Purpose (one sentence)
  • Stack
  • Where the relevant code for the current task lives
  • Conventions to follow (linter, test framework, doc style)
  • Any "watch out for X" you noticed (active migration, deprecated dir, etc.)

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 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. 12d ago First seen · 78 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A c55e214d8a85

Subscribe to this mod's changes

orienting-to-repo is a skill published in the GitHub repository gg-mo/repo-hygiene (3 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 914 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 2026-08-31.

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