throughline

throughline is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jovesun-lab/whetstone. It costs 232 tokens per session (2,994 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A pair of habits for keeping an AI coding task focused within one session and understandable across sessions. It uses a task list with one main goal and a plain-text handoff for continuing later.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to track the main goal during complex work and leave a compact summary that another session or agent can continue.
Why use it?
Long tasks can drift into related work, while a new session or agent may lose the earlier context. These habits make the main goal visible and preserve the useful thread of work.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the throughline plugin — 1 skill, 2 commands 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/jovesun-lab/whetstone/throughline
Any agent
npx skills add jovesun-lab/whetstone --skill throughline
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jovesun-lab/whetstone

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install throughline, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 2 commands.

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 throughline

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jovesun-lab/whetstone/throughline.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jovesun-lab/whetstone/throughline)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jovesun-lab/whetstone/throughline"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jovesun-lab/whetstone/throughline.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 232 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,994 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 $0.00232 $0.02994
Opus 5 $0.00116 $0.01497
Sonnet 5 $0.00046 $0.00599
Haiku 4.5 $0.00023 $0.00299

Measured 5d ago against content hash 714b8e1e2a06, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

throughline 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.

handoff-skill/throughline/skills/throughline/SKILL.md · 200 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 200 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Throughline

Keep the thread — Task Track within a session, Handoff across them.

For any AI agent reading this file. The frontmatter uses Claude's skill format; the body is plain markdown. It works the same for Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Cursor, Cline, Aider, or a local model — paste the body in as a prompt if your platform has no skill system. Assume nothing about your host's capabilities; everything here degrades gracefully (see "Capability-agnostic by design" below).

What this is

Long or multi-agent work fails in two predictable ways, and this skill is two habits that each kill one of them:

  • Within a session, reasoning drifts off the goal. You solve a small problem, which surfaces another, which pulls you somewhere adjacent to what you started on. Every step is locally reasonable; together they bend the trajectory. Task Track makes that drift visible by keeping one ⭐️ MAIN goal anchor in front of you.
  • Across sessions, the thread is dropped. A fresh run (or a different agent) starts cold, re-derives what was already known, or trusts a stale summary. Handoff carries the thread forward as a plain-text artifact any agent can pick up.

The correlation — the load-bearing point. The ⭐️ MAIN tag is the shared goal anchor. Task Track holds it within a run; Handoff carries it (plus state) across runs. One sentence: don't lose the thread — within a session or between them. The same anti-drift purpose runs through both, which is why they ship together.

When to use

  • A long or many-step task at real risk of losing the thread → set up Task Track. (For a short, self-contained task that finishes in one pass, skip it — the overhead isn't worth it.)
  • You notice the work has wandered → re-read the ⭐️ MAIN and decide if you've drifted.
  • Wrapping up, running low on context, or switching agents → write a Handoff.
  • Beginning a session that has a prior handoff → run the Resume flow.

Part 1 — Task Track (the within-session half)

Read the full file on GitHub · 200 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. 5d ago First seen · 200 lines · 232 tokens per session scan A 714b8e1e2a06

Subscribe to this mod's changes

throughline is a skill published in the GitHub repository jovesun-lab/whetstone (8 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 232 tokens to every session and 2,994 once invoked, about $0.0012 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories