cairn-attention

cairn-attention is a skill for Claude Code from isaacriehm/cairn. It costs 25 tokens per session (5,778 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for resolving pending Cairn attention items, including draft decisions, baseline findings, and drift events. Cairn is the connected system that supplies these items.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review and resolve pending Cairn items, retry setup when required, and surface recovery steps when setup fails.
Why use it?
It brings unresolved Cairn items into the current conversation and explains what to do if the connection has not been initialized.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: when-to-use in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the cairn plugin — 5 skills, 4 commands, 5 agents, 5 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to review and resolve pending Cairn items, retry setup when required, and surface recovery steps when setup fails.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-attention
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 isaacriehm/cairn --skill cairn-attention
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/isaacriehm/cairn

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cairn, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 4 commands, 5 agents, 5 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 cairn-attention

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-attention"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-attention.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,778 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 $0.00025 $0.05778
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.02889
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.01156
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00578

Measured 10d ago against content hash bb1ebaad8edc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cairn-attention 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.

packages/cairn-plugin/skills/cairn-attention/SKILL.md · 541 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 541 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: cairn-attention

Host portability

This skill is shared by Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. Resolve Cairn MCP tools with the host's native discovery mechanism. AskUserQuestion means the host's structured question UI; when that UI is unavailable, ask the identical concise A/B/C question in chat and pause. References to restarting a client mean restarting the active host.

You are surfacing Cairn's pending-attention queue inline so the operator can resolve drafts and findings without leaving the chat. Spec: docs/PLUGIN_ARCHITECTURE.md §11.

Step 0 — bootstrap preflight

Before surfacing any DEC choices, verify the clone is bootstrapped. SessionStart auto-runs cairn join when core.hooksPath is unset, so by the time this skill engages bootstrap should be wired. If cairn_resolve_attention still refuses with BOOTSTRAP_REQUIRED, SessionStart's auto-bootstrap failed — call cairn_bootstrap_retry once to retry inline. On ok: true, fall through to Step 0.7. On ok: false, surface the failed_steps list to the operator and end the turn (the remediation field of the error envelope cites this same tool plus an agent-client restart as the recovery paths). Never reference cli.mjs or cairn join directly in the chat surface — Plugin spec §11 forbids exposing CLI subcommands to the operator.

Step 0.2 — mission attention (phase_ready_to_exit + drift)

Before the regular attention queue, handle mission-specific surfaces. These don't go through cairn_resolve_attention — missions have their own resolver tool (cairn_mission_advance).

Preload the mission tools alongside the existing attention tools:

ToolSearch(select:mcp__plugin_cairn_cairn__cairn_mission_get,mcp__plugin_cairn_cairn__cairn_mission_advance,AskUserQuestion)

Then call:

cairn_mission_get({})

If active: false, skip this step.

0.2a — phase ready to exit

When the active phase's tasks all graduate under exit_gate=prompt, Cairn surfaces a phase-exit decision via one of two channels — both arrive as plain context, no red "Stop hook error" frame:

Read the full file on GitHub · 541 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 · 541 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A bb1ebaad8edc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cairn-attention is a skill published in the GitHub repository isaacriehm/cairn (6 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 5,778 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.