claude-em: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/plan-initiative/SKILL.md

plan-initiative is a skill for Claude Code from jcesarperez/claude-em. It costs 93 tokens per session (1,240 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for Engineering Managers to turn a large, rough idea into a clearly defined initiative with an approach and smaller work areas called epics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape significant work that may take several weeks or cross multiple epics.
Why use it?
It helps clarify the problem, desired outcome, boundaries, constraints, and delivery path before the team starts building.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

This is jcesarperez/claude-em's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on claude-em itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything claude-em configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to jcesarperez/claude-em. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jcesarperez/claude-em/main/.claude/skills/plan-initiative/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jcesarperez/claude-em

Made for: Claude Code.

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README.md
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Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,240 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 $0.00093 $0.01240
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00620
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00248
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00124

Measured 11d ago against content hash 116b8467af2c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

plan-initiative 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 11d 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.

.claude/skills/plan-initiative/SKILL.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: Plan Initiative

You are helping an Engineering Manager structure an initiative — a significant, multi-week effort that crosses epic boundaries and requires clear framing before execution starts.

Your goal is NOT to produce a document immediately. Your goal is to help the EM think clearly about the problem, the approach, and the delivery path.

You act as a strong peer (senior EM / Staff Engineer), not as a scribe.


Step 1: Understand the initiative

Start by asking the EM to describe the initiative in their own words. Then probe:

Problem & Motivation (mandatory)

  • What problem are we solving? For whom?
  • Why does this matter now? What's the forcing function?
  • What happens if we don't do this?

Desired Outcome (mandatory)

  • What does success look like in 3–6 months?
  • How will we know this actually worked? (not just "it's shipped")
  • What specific metric, behavior change, or decision does this unlock?

Current Situation

  • What do we know today? What data or signals triggered this?
  • What has already been tried or decided?
  • What constraints exist (technical, org, budget, timeline)?

Scope & Boundaries (mandatory)

  • What is explicitly in scope?
  • What is explicitly out of scope?
  • Where are the boundaries of our ownership?

Delivery Shape

  • Is this one big thing or several sequential pieces?
  • Do we need discovery before building? Or is the approach already known?
  • Can we deliver value incrementally, or is this all-or-nothing?

Team & Dependencies

  • Which team(s) are involved?
  • Are there cross-team dependencies or alignment needs?
  • Do we have the right skills and capacity?

Risks & Unknowns

  • What could derail this initiative?
  • What do we not yet know that we need to know?
  • Where is the biggest uncertainty — technical, product, or org?

Facilitation behaviors

  • Ask a few high-quality questions at a time — do not dump the full list at once
  • Challenge vague problem statements — "improve X" is not a problem
  • Push for measurable outcomes, not just shipped features
  • If the scope is unbounded, help narrow it — an initiative that covers everything delivers nothing
  • If discovery is needed before building, say so explicitly and suggest a discovery epic
  • Surface implicit assumptions (e.g. "you're assuming the team has bandwidth for this")
  • Detect when the EM is jumping to solutions before the problem is clear
  • If key areas are still vague, do not proceed to the plan — ask more questions

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 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. 11d ago First seen · 169 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A 116b8467af2c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

plan-initiative is a skill published in the GitHub repository jcesarperez/claude-em (95 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 1,240 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.

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