autonomous

autonomous is a skill for Claude Code from JKHeadley/instar. It costs 41 tokens per session (5,920 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A mode for letting the coding agent work independently for a chosen period while a stop hook prevents it from ending early.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for breaking work into verifiable tasks, proposing a measurable finish condition, getting confirmation, and reporting progress until the agreed conditions are met.
Why use it?
It turns a broad task into explicit completion checks and reduces premature stopping during long development work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit It is for breaking work into verifiable tasks, proposing a measurable finish condition, getting confirmation, and reporting progress until the agreed conditions are met.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous
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 JKHeadley/instar --skill autonomous
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JKHeadley/instar

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 autonomous

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous/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 autonomous

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jkheadley/instar/autonomous.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,920 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 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 $0.00041 $0.05920
Opus 5.5 $0.00016 $0.02368
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00008 $0.01184
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00592

Measured 11d ago against content hash f036118ea893, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

autonomous scanned grade C with 2 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (hooks/autonomous-stop-hook.sh, scripts/setup-autonomous.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Hidden instructionshighPrompt injection

Directives inside HTML comments, invisible characters or bidirectional overrides are read by the model and not by the person reviewing the file.

<!-- W32_PREPARING_LIVENESS — scope-accretion completion discipline: register the run server-side (POST /autonomous/register) and record the returned run_id in the frontmatter; the server then holds completion while deli

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

| curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTH" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
.claude/skills/autonomous/SKILL.md · 449 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 449 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Autonomous Mode (Structurally Enforced)

You are entering autonomous development mode. This mode uses a stop hook that PREVENTS you from exiting until all tasks are genuinely complete. This is not optional — the hook structurally enforces continuous work.


Step 1: Generate Stop Conditions (MANDATORY)

Before activating the stop hook, you MUST:

  1. Analyze the goal and break it into specific, verifiable tasks
  2. Present the task list to the user with clear completion criteria
  3. Propose a measurable completion_condition synthesized from those tasks — an artifact-grounded end-state an INDEPENDENT judge can verify from what you SURFACE (a commit SHA, a file's content, a CI run id, a test-count delta). This is the PRIMARY completion mechanism. Only fall back to a self-declared promise when no verifiable condition can be expressed — and then record completion_mode: promise-fallback + a one-line promise_fallback_reason:.
  4. Wait for user confirmation before activating the hook
  5. Define the completion promise — retained as the fallback token (only TRUE when ALL tasks are done)

Example interaction:

User: /autonomous --duration=8h --goal="Complete Slack feature parity"

Agent: Here's my task breakdown for autonomous mode:

TASKS (all must be complete before I can exit):
- [ ] (1) Implement job-specific Slack channels
- [ ] (2) Build full PresenceProxy Slack integration
- [ ] (3) Update dashboard HTML with platform badges
- [ ] (4) Implement Slack Lifeline process
- [ ] (5) Add platform dropdown to new session UI
...

Completion promise: "ALL_TASKS_COMPLETE"
Duration: 8 hours
Emergency stop: "stop everything" via messaging

Shall I proceed? (The stop hook will prevent me from exiting until all tasks are done)

Task lines must use - [ ] checkboxes (put a number inside the text if you want one: - [ ] (1) ...). Numbered 1. [ ] lines are not read as tasks by the server.

Read the full file on GitHub · 449 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 Changed · +7 lines f036118ea893
  2. 21d ago Changed 48cc4944d7eb
  3. 1mo ago Changed · +5 lines 90f33e7153de
  4. 1mo ago First seen · 437 lines · 41 tokens per session scan C c99eb05bf6c8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

autonomous is a skill published in the GitHub repository JKHeadley/instar (84 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 5,920 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it C with 2 findings (hidden instructions, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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