epic

epic is a skill for Claude Code from jameslowman/planning-with-james. It costs 31 tokens per session (4,899 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning system for large projects made up of several smaller plans, carried out over weeks or months. It keeps project decisions and discoveries in a shared file so later sessions can continue with the same context.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to break down long initiatives, coordinate dependent plans, preserve architectural decisions, and review overall progress.
Why use it?
It reduces the need to reconstruct project history when work is split across many sessions and separate stages.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the planning-with-james plugin — 7 skills, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to break down long initiatives, coordinate dependent plans, preserve architectural decisions, and review overall progress.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic
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 jameslowman/planning-with-james --skill epic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jameslowman/planning-with-james

Made for: Claude Code.

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 epic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic/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 epic

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jameslowman/planning-with-james/epic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,899 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 $0.00031 $0.04899
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.02449
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00980
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00490

Measured 8d ago against content hash 03de2805226f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

epic 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 8d 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/epic/SKILL.md · 657 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 657 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Epic: Plan of Plans

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 and plans live inside the project, not in your home directory. If you're unsure, run pwd to confirm you're in the repo root.

An epic is a large initiative that breaks down into multiple sequential plans, each with its own discovery, planning, implementation, and validation. Epics solve the problem of carrying context across dozens or hundreds of Claude Code sessions over weeks or months.

The core mechanism is learnings.md - a curated, growing document that accumulates architectural decisions, discoveries, and insights from every completed sub-plan. Any fresh session reads this file and immediately has the full history.


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. This destroys all agent work. Always include this parameter on every agent spawn.


MANDATORY: Knowledge Graph Before Source Code

When exploring code for any reason during epic creation or review, you MUST read the knowledge graph first:

  1. Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/_overview.md
  2. Read .claude/planning-with-james/knowledge/_graph.json
  3. Read relevant module _index.md files
  4. THEN explore source code for specific gaps

When spawning subagents, ALWAYS include relevant knowledge file paths in their prompts.


Arguments

$ARGUMENTS controls behavior:

Argument Behavior
(empty) Show existing epics, or start creating a new one
review Run epic review after a sub-plan completes
status Show all epics and their sub-plan progress
{epic-id} Show details for a specific epic

Read the full file on GitHub · 657 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. 8d ago First seen · 657 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 03de2805226f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

epic is a skill published in the GitHub repository jameslowman/planning-with-james (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 4,899 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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