groundwork

A structured way to discover and define what software should be built before implementation begins. It turns a vague request into requirements that can be checked and understood by everyone involved.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before building a feature, system, or significant change, especially when the request is unclear. It helps uncover the real need, prioritize it, write verifiable requirements, and confirm what is in scope.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of building the wrong solution or missing people, constraints, and scope boundaries. The process also provides a way to validate shared understanding and handle changes.

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/iamk77/skill/groundwork
Any agent
npx skills add IamK77/Skill --skill groundwork
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/IamK77/Skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 130 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,830 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 $0.00130 $0.02830
Opus 5 $0.00065 $0.01415
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00566
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00283

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6bb7ab6c0921, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

groundwork 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/engineering/groundwork/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

groundwork

!checklist init ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} --force

Building the wrong thing well is the most expensive mistake in software, and an agent's strongest instinct — implement the literal ask — walks straight into it. This skill is the discipline that runs before code: discover the real need, the people it touches, the unspoken constraints, and the explicit edges of scope. Requirements work is a collaboration — you supply systematic rigor, the user supplies domain truth and the stakes.

This skill walks an explicit five-stage flight plan and will not fly past a GATE until it is cleared.

Discipline: finish every GATE before entering the next stage. GATEs are hard — never skip, batch past, or self-certify a stage you have not actually done. The checklist tool enforces the order; let it. Commands address stages by name, so you never have to track a number.

The agent's special handicap: you cannot walk the floor, run a workshop, or interview the silent stakeholder. So you must enlist the user as proxy for everyone the requirement touches, and you must read what can be read — the existing code, docs, tickets, competitors. Read references/agent-blind-spots.md first; it names the failure modes this skill exists to stop.

Speak the user's language, or the proxy breaks. The user can only stand in for the stakeholders if they actually follow you. Read their domain fluency from how they talk in STAGE 0, and match it — when a technical term or acronym first appears (SSRF, BYOK, p95, idempotent), gloss it in half a sentence. Skipping that is not brevity; it buys a confirmation that confirms nothing — a user nodding at words they did not parse, which makes STAGE 3's "what I understood = what you want" check pass falsely.

When there is no human in the loop (design-only). Sometimes no user is reachable for the whole run — you are scoping an OSS feature from an RFC, or designing against a written spec alone. The skill still applies, in a shifted mode: the invariant never guess silently on a high-blast-radius unknown still binds — its satisfaction shifts from get a yes to park the unknown as a named open question with an owner-to-ask and its blast-radius-if-wrong. Re-point the validation oracle from user intent to the best available written authority (the RFC, an enumerated reviewer comment, a standard like RFC 7519, the existing code) — see the WRITTEN-PROXY rule in references/decision-tree.md. STAGE 3 (Validate) then degrades to replay every Must against its written source + walk the full review checklist + park the unconfirmable; STAGE 4 (Manage) produces a proposed governance contract for whoever inherits the work, not a live authority gate. This is a weaker claim than user-confirmed understanding — label it as such in the handoff. The conservative-default FALLBACKs scattered through the references are this one mode; read them as one.

If $ARGUMENTS names a target to scope, scope that. If the ask is already a fully-pinned, low-risk change (a one-line fix, a rename), this skill is overkill — say so and proceed without it. When in doubt, open the decision tree.

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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 · 142 lines · 130 tokens per session scan A 6bb7ab6c0921

Subscribe to this mod's changes

groundwork is a skill published in the GitHub repository IamK77/Skill (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 130 tokens to every session and 2,830 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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