create-knowledge

create-knowledge is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jameslowman/planning-with-james. It costs 24 tokens per session (5,417 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for building a searchable map of a codebase before planning work. The map records project structure, important files, relationships, and relevant conventions inside the repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it on a first planning pass or full re-index to create or refresh the project knowledge base.
Why use it?
It gives planning work a shared view of the existing code instead of relying on incomplete exploration or memory.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the planning-with-james plugin — 7 skills, 2 hooks 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/jameslowman/planning-with-james/create-knowledge
Any agent
npx skills add jameslowman/planning-with-james --skill create-knowledge
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jameslowman/planning-with-james

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install planning-with-james, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 2 hooks.

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 create-knowledge

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/create-knowledge.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/create-knowledge)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/create-knowledge"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/create-knowledge.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,417 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 $0.00024 $0.05417
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.02708
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.01083
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00542

Measured 4d ago against content hash ead1210aaee5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-knowledge 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 4d 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/create-knowledge/SKILL.md · 565 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 565 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create Knowledge Base

NON-NEGOTIABLE: ALL PATHS ARE RELATIVE TO THE REPO ROOT All .claude/planning-with-james/ paths in this skill are relative to the current working directory (the repo you're working in), NOT ~/.claude/. The knowledge graph lives inside the project, not in your home directory. If you're unsure, run pwd to confirm you're in the repo root.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: PROGRESS TRACKING After each phase completes, you MUST update _create_progress.json BEFORE starting the next phase. This file enables resume after context loss. If autocompact hits mid-creation, re-invoking this skill will pick up where you left off.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: AGENT PERMISSIONS ALL agents you spawn (Task tool) MUST include mode: "bypassPermissions". Background agents that hit permission prompts will have their Write/Edit calls silently denied — they burn through turns doing research but never write output files. The orchestrator then polls for result files that will never exist. This destroys all agent work. Always include this parameter on every agent spawn, background or foreground.

NON-NEGOTIABLE: NO BASH FOR FILE MODIFICATIONS Do NOT use Bash to modify knowledge files. No sed, awk, for loops, echo redirection, or cat heredocs for writing or editing files. ALWAYS use the Read → Edit or Read → Write tools for file changes. Bash is ONLY permitted for: git commands (git diff, git rev-parse, git log) and running project tools (linters, test runners). This applies to you (the orchestrator) AND to all subagents you spawn — include this rule in every subagent prompt. Violating this blocks unattended operation with permission prompts that require manual approval.

You are about to create a comprehensive knowledge base for this codebase. This is a multi-phase process that will deeply analyze the code and create a navigable knowledge graph.

Step 0: Resume Detection

BEFORE anything else, check for an in-progress creation:

Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/_create_progress.json

Read the full file on GitHub · 565 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. 4d ago First seen · 565 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A ead1210aaee5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-knowledge is a skill published in the GitHub repository jameslowman/planning-with-james (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 5,417 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.

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