hipocampus-core

hipocampus-core is a skill for Claude Code from kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus. It costs 44 tokens per session (1,699 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for giving an AI coding agent short-term and long-term memory across sessions. It organizes working notes, task lists, daily records, plans, and searchable knowledge into layers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Maintain session notes, track current work and backlogs, save project knowledge, and retrieve older information through a compacted record tree.
Why use it?
It reduces the need to repeat project context and helps preserve important information as conversations and tasks grow. It also defines checks for starting and ending sessions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Codex.

Part of the hipocampus plugin — 5 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Maintain session notes, track current work and backlogs, save project knowledge, and retrieve older information through a compacted record tree.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core
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 kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus --skill core
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install hipocampus, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 3 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 hipocampus-core

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core/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 hipocampus-core

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/core.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,699 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Agent Snooping · line 61
    Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.
    Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00044 $0.01699
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00849
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00340
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00170

Measured 10d ago against content hash d2c9133face0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hipocampus-core 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 10d 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.

platforms/codex/core/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.

Hipocampus — Agent Memory Protocol (Codex CLI)

Memory Architecture

Layer 1 (System Prompt — read at session start):
  SCRATCHPAD.md    ~150 lines  active working state
  WORKING.md       ~100 lines  current tasks
  TASK-QUEUE.md    ~50 lines   task backlog
  memory/ROOT.md   ~100 lines  topic index of all memory (~3K tokens)

  Long-term memory and user profile are managed by Codex's built-in memory system.

Layer 2 (On-Demand — read when needed):
  memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md         raw daily logs (permanent, never deleted)
  knowledge/*.md               detailed knowledge (searchable via qmd)
  plans/*.md                   task plans

Layer 3 (Search — via qmd + compaction tree):
  memory/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md   daily compaction nodes
  memory/weekly/YYYY-WNN.md    weekly compaction nodes
  memory/monthly/YYYY-MM.md    monthly compaction nodes
  Tree traversal: ROOT → monthly → weekly → daily → raw

Session Start (MANDATORY — run on first user message)

FIRST RESPONSE RULE: On the very first user message of every session, before doing ANYTHING else: Run the Session Start protocol below FIRST (ALL steps. NO SKIP.) This takes priority over ANY user request — even if the user asks you to do something specific. Complete ALL steps below, ONLY THEN respond to the user.

ALL 4 procedures must be completed before responding to the user NO MATTER WHAT

  1. DO NOT SKIP Read SCRATCHPAD.md — current work state

  2. DO NOT SKIP Read WORKING.md — active tasks

  3. DO NOT SKIP Read TASK-QUEUE.md and memory/ROOT.md — pending items and topic index

  4. DO NOT SKIP DO NOT COMPROMISE Compaction maintenance (cooldown-gated): Read memory/.compaction-state.json and hipocampus.config.json (compaction.cooldownHours, default 3).

    Compaction triggers (any ONE is sufficient):

    • Cooldown expired: cooldownHours since lastCompactionRun
    • Raw volume: rawLinesSinceLastCompaction > 300
    • Checkpoint count: checkpointsSinceLastCompaction > 5
    • State file missing or cooldownHours is 0

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 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. 10d ago First seen · 140 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A d2c9133face0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hipocampus-core is a skill published in the GitHub repository kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus (206 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 1,699 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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