maintain-skills

maintain-skills is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills. It costs 44 tokens per session (1,263 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A maintenance guide for keeping shared agent skills consistent across Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor in a Heptabase repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating, editing, moving, removing, or auditing skills under .claude/skills/, maintaining the discovery symlink, and deciding each skill's invocation policy.
Why use it?
It prevents duplicate or misplaced skill files and preserves clear rules about where skills live and when they may run automatically.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the heptabase plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Creating, editing, moving, removing, or auditing skills under .claude/skills/, maintaining the discovery symlink, and deciding each skill's invocation policy.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills
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 heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills --skill maintain-skills
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install heptabase, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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 maintain-skills

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills/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 maintain-skills

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills/maintain-skills.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,263 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. 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 $0.00044 $0.01263
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00632
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00253
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00126

Measured 3d ago against content hash 5ccfc5337cc4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

maintain-skills scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/check-skills.mjs), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

<!-- prettier-ignore -->
.claude/skills/maintain-skills/SKILL.md · 119 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 119 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Maintain Skills

Apply only the Heptabase repository conventions below. Follow the active agent's normal skill-authoring guidance for general skill structure and writing quality.

Use the canonical locations

  • Treat .claude/skills/<skill-name>/ as the canonical source for team-owned repository skills.
  • Keep .agents/skills as a symlink to ../.claude/skills so Codex and other Agent Skills clients discover the same skills.
  • Do not copy team skills into .cursor/skills/ or .codex/skills/.
  • Use convert-cursor-to-claude-skill when converting rules, migrating commands, or fixing misplaced skill directories. This skill owns skill content and metadata, not path migration.

Decide the invocation policy

For every new skill, explicitly decide whether the model may invoke it automatically.

For an existing skill, preserve its current invocation policy unless the user asks to change it or the skill's intended behavior has materially changed.

The user's stated invocation choice always wins; you can suggest or ask but not override it. Do not override it with the defaults below.

Intended behavior SKILL.md agents/openai.yaml
The agent may load it when relevant Omit disable-model-invocation, or set it to false Omit policy.allow_implicit_invocation, or set it to true
Only the user may start it Set disable-model-invocation: true Set policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false

Because Codex allows implicit invocation by default, a human-invocation-only skill must include both settings and the complete UI metadata described below. An implicitly invocable skill may omit agents/openai.yaml unless it needs Codex UI metadata or dependencies.

When the user has not chosen:

  • Prefer model invocation for repository conventions, reference knowledge, and guidance that should apply whenever relevant.
  • Consider explicit-only invocation for named workflows whose timing the user is expected to control.
  • Do not infer explicit-only invocation only because a workflow uses tools, requires approval, or can cause side effects. Authorization is still checked when the action occurs.
  • If the correct invocation behavior is not easy to judge from the skill's purpose, ask the user before finalizing the skill.

Read the full file on GitHub · 119 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 3d ago Changed · +2 lines 5ccfc5337cc4
  2. 12d ago First seen · 117 lines · 44 tokens per session scan C 680b6b3ea8b7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

maintain-skills is a skill published in the GitHub repository heptameta/heptabase-cli-skills (152 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 1,263 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (hidden instructions). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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