start-here

A starting-point guide for founders building with AI who are unsure what stage they are at or what to do next.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess an idea, distinguish an AI feature from an AI-native product, clarify the main hypothesis, map the market, and choose a follow-up skill.
Why use it?
It helps prevent spending months on the wrong problem by checking whether AI is essential to the product and identifying the next useful step.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ai-native-os plugin — 25 skills, 6 agents shipped together

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/impactbrussels/ainativeos/start-here
Any agent
npx skills add impactbrussels/AINativeOS --skill start-here
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/impactbrussels/AINativeOS

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ai-native-os, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 6 agents.

Per session 133 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,028 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 $0.00133 $0.01028
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.00514
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00206
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00103

Measured 2d ago against content hash d7d6bcb6b30a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start-here 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/start-here/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Start Here

Founders rarely fail for lack of effort; they fail by pouring months into the wrong thing for the stage they're at. This skill's only job is to tell you where you are and the single next thing to do, then get out of the way. It also runs the one test that decides whether you're building a company or a feature.

The method

Diagnose the stage, run the Remove-the-AI test, route to one skill. Full build-arc map, the test in full, the symptom-to-skill table, a worked diagnosis, and anti-patterns: references/stage-diagnosis.md.

Step 1: Run the Remove-the-AI test

Ask: take the AI out of your product, does it still work? If yes, you have an AI feature, not an AI-native company. Before anything else, find the closed loop that would make it break without the intelligence. If there isn't one, that is the work.

Step 2: Locate the stage

Place the founder on the build arc by what they can't yet answer:

If they can't answer… They're at Run next
"What's the sharp, falsifiable bet?" Frame frame-the-hypothesis
"Who's the market, and where's the regulatory/competitive wedge?" Frame map-the-terrain
"What's the system, before any code?" Architect architect-before-code
"How do I build it with agents without it collapsing?" Build agentic-build-loop
"How is this safe enough to act on a human?" Trust eval-and-safety-harness
"What's the smallest agent that proves the loop?" Ship design-the-mva
"Is it actually working?" Grow measure-ai-native-pmf

Step 3: Route to the earliest unvalidated assumption

When two stages fit, send them upstream. The highest-value work is almost always the riskiest belief they haven't tested yet, not the most exciting one.

Output

  • The result of the Remove-the-AI test, stated plainly (native or wrapper, and what's missing).
  • The founder's current stage and the one skill to run next, with a one-line reason.

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 77 lines · 133 tokens per session scan A d7d6bcb6b30a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start-here is a skill published in the GitHub repository impactbrussels/AINativeOS (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 133 tokens to every session and 1,028 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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