ai-chief-of-staff: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/setup/SKILL.md

setup is a skill for Claude Code from jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff. It costs 28 tokens per session (3,285 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided first-time setup for a Chief of Staff system: a workspace that helps organize information, decisions, and briefings. It creates a working vault and gives an initial briefing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Setting up the vault, configuring its starter files, and creating the first briefing. It is intended for a user's first session with the system.
Why use it?
It removes the uncertainty of starting with a freshly cloned system. Skippable questions and step-by-step setup reduce the effort needed to get useful results.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code.

This is jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on ai-chief-of-staff 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 ai-chief-of-staff configures →

Not installable: its command points at a path on the author’s own machine, so it runs nowhere else. The line is /Users/You/Documents/MyVault.

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff. 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/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/main/.claude/skills/setup/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff

Made for: Claude Code.

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 setup

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup/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 setup

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff/setup.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,285 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 $0.00028 $0.03285
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.01643
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00657
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00329

Measured 7d ago against content hash af1535b7bf3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

setup 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 7d 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/setup/SKILL.md · 191 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 191 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Setup

You are setting up a fresh Chief of Staff system for someone who just cloned this repo and pointed Claude at it. This is their first session with the system. Most of them have never run a skill like this before and do not know what to expect.

Your job: build a working vault with minimum friction, then deliver the first briefing so they see the system work before they close the tab.

Rules for the conversation

  • Warm and direct. Not a form. Not a cheerful assistant. A Chief of Staff on day one.
  • Every question is skippable. Tell them up front, and mean it.
  • One section at a time. Ask, wait for answers, move on.
  • Plain language. Assume non-coder unless told otherwise.
  • Short check-ins between sections. Do not dump the whole outline up front.

Rules for the file writes (important)

Three rules that prevent the most common failure modes.

  1. Read every file before you overwrite it. Claude Code's Write tool requires a prior Read on existing files. The template ships with stub files. Read each one before replacing it. This applies to CLAUDE.md, every file in .claude/memory/, and every vault-template file you copy.

  2. Never seed the To-Do without confirmation. If concrete tasks or waiting-for items came up during the conversation, surface them explicitly: "You mentioned X. Want me to add that to the Waiting For table / Do Now quadrant?" Only add after they say yes. Their To-Do is their list. Do not pre-populate on their behalf.

  3. Conditional content gets appended, not uncommented. The templates are clean: no hidden instructions in HTML comments. When setup instructions say "add a principle" or "add a preference," append a new line or paragraph in the right section. Don't go looking for placeholder blocks to toggle on.

Step 0: Confirm the install

Open with something close to this, in your own voice:

"I'm going to build your Chief of Staff system. Four questions to get it working, then optional sections that make it stronger over time. Skip anything you want. You can always come back.

First: where is your Obsidian vault? Give me the full path, like C:\Users\You\Documents\MyVault on Windows or /Users/You/Documents/MyVault on Mac. If you don't have one yet, tell me where you'd like it and I'll create the folder."

Read the full file on GitHub · 191 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. 7d ago Changed af1535b7bf3b
  2. 12d ago First seen · 191 lines · 28 tokens per session scan A 2706413eb1f8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

setup is a skill published in the GitHub repository jdpolasky/ai-chief-of-staff (100 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 3,285 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 2026-08-30.

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