ucai-patterns

ucai-patterns is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Joncik91/ucai. It costs 42 tokens per session (1,508 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A collection of recommended practices for working with Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, and its built-in ways to manage context and project instructions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing agents, configuring hooks, managing session context, or organizing persistent project notes and reusable skills in Claude Code.
Why use it?
It helps prevent important project state from being lost and avoids filling every session with instructions that are not needed. The guidance keeps the assistant's working context focused.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ucai plugin — 8 skills, 10 commands, 8 agents, 8 hooks shipped together

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/joncik91/ucai/ucai-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add Joncik91/ucai --skill ucai-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Joncik91/ucai

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ucai, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 10 commands, 8 agents, 8 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 ucai-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/joncik91/ucai/ucai-patterns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/joncik91/ucai/ucai-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/joncik91/ucai/ucai-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/joncik91/ucai/ucai-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,508 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 $0.00042 $0.01508
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00754
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00302
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00151

Measured 5d ago against content hash d086d99d63f0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ucai-patterns 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 5d 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/ucai-patterns/SKILL.md · 140 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ucai Patterns

Best practices for working with Claude Code's native architecture. These patterns are derived from how Anthropic builds their own plugins.

Context Management

The context window is a shared resource. Protect it.

Native tools for context:

  • SessionStart hooks: Inject project-specific context at session start
  • tasks/todo.md: Write progress to tasks/todo.md so hooks can inject state and context compaction doesn't lose your place
  • Skills with progressive disclosure: Metadata always loaded, details on demand
  • File system: Use .local.md files for persistent state between iterations

Anti-patterns:

  • Stuffing CLAUDE.md with framework instructions (use project facts only)
  • Repeating information Claude already knows (conventions of popular frameworks, etc.)
  • Loading everything upfront instead of on demand

For detailed patterns, see: references/context-management.md

Red Flags — Context Management

Pathological Honesty applies to every Red Flags table in this skill: the "Reality" column states what's wrong with the thought. When you catch yourself in one of these thoughts, name a concrete failure mode you've already seen or can see — a real session that overflowed, a real agent that hung, a real CLAUDE.md that drifted. Abstract realism doesn't change behavior; concrete failure modes do.

Thought Reality
"CLAUDE.md is the right place for this framework pattern" CLAUDE.md is for project facts only. Framework conventions belong in skills.
"I'll load all context upfront to be safe" Upfront loading burns context before it's needed. Load on demand.
"The context window is large enough" Large ≠ infinite. Shared resource. Protect it.

Agent Patterns

Agents are focused workers, not personas.

Native agent format: Markdown files with YAML frontmatter declaring name, description, tools, model, and color. Each agent has a specific mission.

Key patterns:

  • Spawn 2-3 agents in parallel for independent analysis
  • Assign appropriate models (sonnet for exploration, opus for deep bug analysis)
  • Restrict tool access to what each agent needs
  • Consolidate results in the orchestrating command, not in another agent
  • 1 message = ALL agents: Spawn all parallel agents in one message — see Batch Operations below

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 5d ago First seen · 140 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A d086d99d63f0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ucai-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository Joncik91/ucai (29 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 1,508 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 2026-08-30.

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