vision

A project guide that records what a product is for, what it is not for, how decisions should be made, and which words have specific meanings. It stores this shared context in a root CONTEXT.md file for people and coding agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting a project, reviewing or extending its direction, defining non-goals, documenting decision principles, or creating a domain glossary.
Why use it?
It reduces confusion when a project is vague or when future work needs to follow the same product boundaries and terminology.

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/howells/arc/vision
Any agent
npx skills add howells/arc --skill vision
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/howells/arc

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,140 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 $0.00076 $0.02140
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.01070
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00428
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00214

Measured 2d ago against content hash 46d0720039bf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vision 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.

plugins/arc/skills/vision/SKILL.md · 229 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 229 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<tool_restrictions> Ask one question at a time. In Claude Code use AskUserQuestion; elsewhere ask a single concise plain-text question. Keep any lead-in to 2-3 sentences. Don't narrate missing tools or fallbacks. </tool_restrictions>

<arc_runtime> Requires the full Arc bundle. Arc-owned paths (agents/, references/, disciplines/, templates/, scripts/, rules/, skills/) resolve from the plugin root — the directory containing agents/ and skills/. Everything else is the user's repository. </arc_runtime>

Vision Workflow

Create or maintain a project's root CONTEXT.md: its goals, product boundary, non-goals, decision principles, and domain language. The output should be useful to future humans and agents: specific enough to guide decisions, short enough to be read, and honest about constraints.

Start

When invoked:

  1. State that you are using /arc:vision.
  2. Determine which mode applies to the project's CONTEXT.md: review, extend, or start fresh.
  3. Inspect existing project context before asking questions.
  4. Ask one focused question at a time only when the direction is still unclear.

Context To Inspect

Read what exists from this list. Do not fail if a file is absent:

  • CONTEXT.md
  • CONTEXT-MAP.md
  • docs/vision.md (legacy — fold its content into CONTEXT.md if found)
  • README.md
  • AGENTS.md
  • docs/brand-system.md
  • docs/design-context.md
  • package.json
  • app, package, or domain folder names that reveal the product shape

If CONTEXT.md already exists, read it first and preserve the user's content. Update and extend it — sharpen goals, boundary, and glossary — rather than overwriting. If the user did not specify a mode, ask:

AskUserQuestion:
  question: "I found an existing CONTEXT.md. What would you like to do?"
  header: "Existing Context"
  options:
    - label: "Review"
      description: "Assess the current CONTEXT.md and suggest improvements without overwriting it"
    - label: "Extend"
      description: "Update and sharpen goals, boundary, and glossary, preserving existing content"
    - label: "Start fresh"
      description: "Replace it with a new CONTEXT.md"

Read the full file on GitHub · 229 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. 2d ago First seen · 229 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 46d0720039bf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vision is a skill published in the GitHub repository howells/arc (25 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 2,140 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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