orient

A guided codebase walkthrough that explains a project's purpose, structure, features, conventions, and development workflow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Onboarding developers, mapping important files and modules, and producing a concise orientation document.
Why use it?
It reduces the time needed to understand an unfamiliar repository before making changes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/jcottam/agent-resources/orient
Any agent
npx skills add jcottam/agent-resources --skill orient
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jcottam/agent-resources

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,184 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 $0.00096 $0.02184
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01092
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00437
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00218

Measured 2d ago against content hash 0053fc01fd6b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

orient 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/engineering/orient/SKILL.md · 252 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 252 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Orient

Systematically explore a codebase and produce a structured orientation that tells a developer everything they need to start working productively. Depth scales with project size — small projects get a tight summary, large projects get a layered map.

Phase 1 — Project Identity

Establish what the project is before reading any source code.

Read top-level files (in order of priority)

  1. README.md / README — stated purpose, setup instructions, feature list
  2. AGENTS.md — architecture boundaries, "always do / never do" rules
  3. .cursor/rules/ — workspace conventions for this project
  4. Manifest file — package.json, pyproject.toml, Cargo.toml, go.mod, pom.xml, Gemfile, composer.json, or equivalent
  5. CONTRIBUTING.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/ index — if present

Extract

  • One-sentence purpose: What does this project do, for whom?
  • Domain: What problem space does it operate in?
  • Stage: Early build, growth, or mature/stable?
  • Key dependencies: Frameworks, databases, external services

If the README is absent or unhelpful, infer purpose from the manifest description field, directory names, and import patterns.

Phase 2 — Shape

Map the physical layout without reading file contents yet.

# Get directory tree (depth 2–3 depending on project size)
find . -type f | head -200
# or
tree -L 3 -I 'node_modules|.git|dist|build|__pycache__|venv|.venv|target'

Categorize top-level directories

Role Common names What to look for
Source src/, lib/, app/, pkg/, internal/ Production code
Tests test/, tests/, spec/, __tests__/ Test suites
Config Root dotfiles, config/, .github/ Build/CI/lint config
Docs docs/, doc/, wiki/ Documentation
Infra infra/, deploy/, terraform/, k8s/, docker/ Deployment
Scripts scripts/, bin/, tools/ Automation helpers
Generated dist/, build/, out/, target/ Build artifacts (skip)

Read the full file on GitHub · 252 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. 2d ago First seen · 252 lines · 96 tokens per session scan A 0053fc01fd6b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

orient is a skill published in the GitHub repository jcottam/agent-resources (30 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 2,184 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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