cold-read-gate

cold-read-gate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from laurigates/claude-plugins. It costs 42 tokens per session (3,111 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review step for text that will be read by people without the surrounding project context. It uses an isolated fresh reader to find confusing references, missing explanations, or unclear instructions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check issue reports, documentation, pull-request descriptions, and other outward-facing text for clarity and self-contained explanations.
Why use it?
Writers who have spent time on a project often overlook assumptions that new readers cannot see. The review exposes those gaps before the text is published.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-patterns-plugin plugin — 22 skills 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/laurigates/claude-plugins/cold-read-gate
Any agent
npx skills add laurigates/claude-plugins --skill cold-read-gate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/laurigates/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-patterns-plugin, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills.

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 cold-read-gate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laurigates/claude-plugins/cold-read-gate.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/laurigates/claude-plugins/cold-read-gate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/laurigates/claude-plugins/cold-read-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/laurigates/claude-plugins/cold-read-gate.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 3,111 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 $0.03111
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.01555
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00622
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00311

Measured today against content hash 66a6c326c78a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-read-gate 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 today.

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.

agent-patterns-plugin/skills/cold-read-gate/SKILL.md · 243 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 243 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold-Read Gate

Text written inside a long session inherits the session's context — codenames, version baselines, internal PR numbers, "the obvious fix" — and the author can no longer see which parts won't survive contact with a reader who has none of it. Before publishing an outward-bound artifact, dispatch an isolated, cheap, context-free agent to read it cold and interrogate it. What confuses the cold reader is what will cost you a round-trip question (or a silent deprioritization) from the real audience.

The reader is deliberately haiku, isolated, and shown only the artifact. This is a measured exception to the "always Opus for subagents" rule: the subagent here is not doing delegated work — it is the measurement instrument. The test is "can a low-context reader act on this text alone?", and a stronger model (or one with session context) would answer a different, easier question. If haiku can act on it, a busy maintainer can.

When to Use This Skill

"Outward-bound" means any audience that lacks your session context — external maintainers and future teammates reading internal docs cold both qualify.

Use this skill when... Skip when...
Filing issues/MRs on an upstream tracker (external maintainers) Internal scratch notes, commit messages, chat replies
Publishing docs a new team member will land on cold The artifact is throwaway or has a captive expert audience
PR descriptions for reviewers outside the work's context The text is one paragraph — just reread it yourself
Emails / announcements leaving the team The same artifact already passed a gate and only typos changed
Batch-producing N artifacts (one reader per artifact, parallel)

The Gate Protocol

Step 1: Artifact on disk

The artifact must be a file. The reader gets a path, not pasted text — paste invites the orchestrator to "helpfully" add context, which defeats the test.

Step 2: Dispatch the cold reader — synchronously

One Agent per artifact, all in a single message when batching. Run each reader synchronously (run_in_background: false — set it explicitly; as of Claude Code 2.1.232 non-teammate spawns run in the background by default) — the reader's entire job is a one-shot critique, and a synchronous run returns that critique directly as the Agent tool result. There is nothing to gain from backgrounding it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 243 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. today Changed · +38 lines 66a6c326c78a
  2. 4d ago First seen · 205 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 64936ab91b8d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-read-gate is a skill published in the GitHub repository laurigates/claude-plugins (57 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 3,111 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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