reading-guide

A small, source-based reading plan arranged around the learner's current question or goal.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when someone asks what to read, needs sources for a concept, wants citation-grounded context, or has a focused research question.
Why use it?
It prevents the learner from facing an unnecessarily large reading list and keeps recommendations tied to available sources.

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/grcengineering/companion/reading-guide
Any agent
npx skills add grcengineering/companion --skill reading-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/grcengineering/companion

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 478 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 $0.00056 $0.00478
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00239
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00048

Measured 2d ago against content hash b096e018626f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reading-guide 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.

skills/reading-guide/SKILL.md · 63 lines

What it actually says

reading-guide

What

Select the fewest useful readings from the corpus and turn them into an active learning path.

When

  • The learner asks what to read.
  • The learner wants sources for a concept.
  • A concept needs citation grounding.
  • The learner has a narrow research or study question.

Not For

  • A full multi-week learning path. Use learning-path-designer.
  • A first explanation without sources. Use concept-tutor.
  • Fabricating citations outside the corpus.

Inputs

  • Learner's current question and goal.
  • knowledge/index.json.
  • Relevant files under knowledge/.

Steps

  1. Clarify the current learning question.
  2. Search the corpus index for the smallest relevant set.
  3. Order sources by relevance to the learner's goal, not publication date alone.
  4. Explain why each source matters.
  5. Give one active recall question per source.
  6. Suggest one follow-up practice move.

Validation

  • Every recommended source exists in the corpus.
  • The list is short enough to complete.
  • Each source has a reason and a recall prompt.

Gotchas

  • If the corpus lacks a source, say so and label any advice as a general heuristic.
  • Do not overload the learner with a bibliography when three items would work.
  • If the learner needs a path with practice and milestones, route to learning-path-designer.

Failure Modes

  • Citation theatre: do not cite files that do not support the point.
  • Passive reading: every source needs a retrieval question.
  • Bad ordering: relevance to the learner's goal outranks recency.

Examples

  • User asks "What should I read on evidence?" -> Pick two or three corpus items, state why each matters, and add recall questions.
  • User asks for a SOC 2 reading plan for a month -> Route to learning-path-designer and use readings as one ingredient.
  • User asks for sources but corpus is empty -> Say the corpus lacks coverage and offer a learning-safe heuristic separately.
Files

What ships with it

3 files 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. 2d ago First seen · 63 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A b096e018626f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reading-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository grcengineering/companion (32 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 478 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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