scaffold-cost-check

scaffold-cost-check is a skill for Claude Code from haabe/mycelium. It costs 47 tokens per session (1,612 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A one-time audit of the text and files an agent routinely loads for the Mycelium project, including its instructions, tooling, project canvas, and stored memory. It produces a structured estimate of how much context that scaffolding consumes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to measure the current context cost of a Mycelium setup. It can support decisions about adding project files or tracking the estimate over time.
Why use it?
It replaces vague claims about instruction overhead with an estimate based on the project's actual files. This makes it easier to spot costly additions before they become part of the routine load.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions AGENTS.md.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the mycelium plugin — 61 skills, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to measure the current context cost of a Mycelium setup. It can support decisions about adding project files or tracking the estimate over time.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add haabe/mycelium
Claude Code
/plugin install mycelium

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mycelium, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 61 skills, 6 hooks.

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 scaffold-cost-check

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check/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 scaffold-cost-check

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haabe/mycelium/scaffold-cost-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,612 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 $0.00047 $0.01612
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00806
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00322
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00161

Measured 10d ago against content hash 0ec09e89607d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scaffold-cost-check 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 10d 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.

plugins/mycelium/skills/scaffold-cost-check/SKILL.md · 108 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scaffold Cost Check

Measure the token cost of Mycelium's stable scaffolding — the context surface loaded at SessionStart and on routine canvas/memory reads — so claims about "negligible overhead" are auditable. Datadog's State of AI Engineering (2026) reports ~69% of input tokens across production agents are system prompts; this skill makes Mycelium's analogous number visible.

When to Use

  • First-time audit on a project to compare actual scaffold cost against any "~6K negligible" claim in landscape/positioning.
  • Periodic refresh via /mycelium:framework-health (see Wiring below).
  • Before adding a new canvas file or harness doc that joins the stable load surface, to surface the marginal cost.

Preflight: Read target canvas file(s) before any Write/Edit

Hard rule. Before issuing Write or Edit against any .claude/canvas/*.yml, use the Read tool on that file in this session. This skill only WRITES if explicitly asked to persist its output to dora-metrics.yml#apex.scaffold_token_estimate; default behavior is print-only.

Workflow

  1. Inventory the stable scaffold surfaces in the current project's plugin cache (or fall back to .claude/ for legacy installs):
    • CLAUDE.md (project-local; the dispatcher)
    • ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/engine/ (all .md and .yml)
    • ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/harness/ (all .md)
    • AGENTS.md (project-local, if present — the router for non-Claude-Code runtimes; not a plugin file. It lives at a repo root and is never packaged, so resolving it through the plugin cache always missed and the row silently vanished from the table via the "if present" clause. Report 0 / absent explicitly when the project has none, rather than omitting the row — an omitted row reads as "not part of the surface" instead of "not there")
    • .claude/canvas/ (project state — not framework, but it ALSO joins the load surface; report separately)
    • .claude/memory/ (corrections.md, patterns.md, MEMORY.md)
  2. Sum bytes per surface via wc -c.
  3. Convert bytes → tokens via the 4-bytes-per-token heuristic (±15% for English markdown across OpenAI/Anthropic tokenizers). Document the heuristic + the uncertainty band in the output.
  4. Render the output block (see Output below).
  5. Optional: persist to canvas if the user passes --write. Path: .claude/canvas/dora-metrics.yml#apex.scaffold_token_estimate. Follow the Postflight discipline below.

Read the full file on GitHub · 108 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. 10d ago First seen · 108 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 0ec09e89607d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scaffold-cost-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository haabe/mycelium (45 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 1,612 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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