Open Steps is a collection of coding-agent skills that explain development sessions, decisions, results, and next steps in plain language. It is intended for people who use agents to build software but do not want to rely on engineering jargon, and supports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Gemini CLI. The catalogue entries provide the skills, hooks, plugin, and command that make up this workflow.
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.
npx skills add kharmanskyi/open-steps --skill os-whats-nextgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kharmanskyi/open-stepsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kharmanskyi/open-steps/os-whats-next)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kharmanskyi/open-steps/os-whats-next"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kharmanskyi/open-steps/os-whats-next/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kharmanskyi/open-steps/os-whats-next"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kharmanskyi/open-steps/os-whats-next.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, 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 Rogue Agent · line 33 Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 68 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00155 | $0.01890 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00062 | $0.00756 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00031 | $0.00378 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00189 |
Grade A, and why
os-whats-next 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 24d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 161 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
os-whats-next
Answer "what do we do now" with the next move, not a map. The user does not
need the dependency graph - they need what got finished, what to take next,
and why, in plain words. This skill decides; os-step-by-step walks the user
through their part; os-done-or-not reports what came of it.
Language
Write in the language the user speaks in this session, detected from the conversation. Commands, file names and identifiers stay English.
When to use
Triggers: the description above, plus a session just ended wanting a next move.
Step 1 - read the state, quickest first
Stop as soon as you can answer.
-
The last report -
~/.claude/open-steps/reports/<project>/latest.md: a handover written for exactly this moment. -
Local state - uncommitted changes, unpushed commits, current branch.
-
Open pull requests - one call:
gh pr list --json number,title,mergeStateStatus,reviewDecision,isDraft. -
The backlog - always. The issue tracker when one is already connected (never authenticate or install one), otherwise task files in the repo:
BIG-PICTURE.md,PLAN.md,TODO.md,docs/plan*. Next work comes from the backlog, not from imagination. No backlog anywhere → say so.Where
os-big-picturekeeps that file, only the "What is next" section is the backlog. The feature table above it is an inventory, and a row that has not changed in months is a finished feature, not a task. Reading work out of it is inventing work, which rule 4 below forbids. A row under "Worth retiring" is a real candidate, but it is a decision to put to the user, never a task to start.That file carries its own age: a measured date at the top and a date beside every stage. Never take a number out of it. Take only the "What is next" list, the "Worth retiring" rows, and each
Stagewith the date beside it. Before you put a "Worth retiring" row to the user, measure it again. From the project root, runbash <this skill's folder>/../os-big-picture/scripts/census.sh .. The.is the project, not the skill folder. If the script is missing or does not run, say so and call that row "not checked". When the stage dates are months behind the newest commit, say how old they are. Dates that stopped moving mean the reports stopped, not that the work did.
What ships with it
1 file 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.
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.
- 24d ago Changed · +5 lines a42ea2c2588c
- 1mo ago Changed · +21 lines 561c5e9898db
- 1mo ago First seen · 135 lines · 155 tokens per session scan A 369405647e4d
os-whats-next is a skill published in the GitHub repository kharmanskyi/open-steps (1,184 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 155 tokens to every session and 1,890 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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