What is law-upstream?

A workflow for merging paper-project changes into shared common writing resources. It handles bibliography entries, writing-guide changes, and selected build or verification scripts.

Use it to upstream new BibTeX references, changes to CLAUDE.md, or updates to paper build and verification scripts.

It helps keep multiple academic papers in sync with shared references, writing rules, and build tools while showing changes before they are merged.

law-upstream — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by li-ch/law-skills

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 li-ch/law-skills --skill law-upstream

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/li-ch/law-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/li-ch/law-skills/law-upstream.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 619 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.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00053	$0.00619
Opus 5.5	$0.00021	$0.00248
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00011	$0.00124
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00062

Measured 2mo ago against content hash c913c0465de4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

law-upstream 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 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/upstream-bib.sh, scripts/upstream-claude.sh, tests/run-tests.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

law-upstream/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

LAW Upstream

Merge local paper modifications back to ~/.common-law/. This keeps the global bib file, writing guide, and build scripts in sync across all papers.

What gets tracked

Three categories of local changes:

New bib entries — citations added to the paper's refs.bib that don't exist in ~/.common-law/bib/refs.bib
CLAUDE.md changes — modifications to the writing guide (excluding the "Paper Narrative" section)
Script changes — modifications to build.sh, build.bat, or verify.sh

Workflow

Step 1: Scan for changes

Run scripts/upstream-bib.sh to find new bib entries and scripts/upstream-claude.sh to find CLAUDE.md changes.

For script changes, diff the paper's scripts against the skill's canonical copies.

Step 2: Present options to user

Show a grouped list:

Changes ready to upstream:

[Bib entries — 3 new]
  1. extraref1 — "Machine Learning for Resource Management..." (Garcia, EuroSys 2025)
  2. extraref2 — "Reinforcement Learning for Cluster Scheduling" (Nguyen, MLSys 2024)
  3. extraref3 — "A Formal Analysis of Joint..." (Tanaka, PER 2025)

[CLAUDE.md changes]
  4. Added "No hyphens" rule to Hard Prohibitions section

[Script changes]
  (none)

Select items to upstream (e.g., "1,2,4" or "all"):

Step 3: Merge selected changes

Bib entries: append to ~/.common-law/bib/refs.bib, deduplicate by citation key
CLAUDE.md: strip the "Paper Narrative" section and everything below it, then merge changes into ~/.common-law/paper-style/CLAUDE.md
Scripts: copy to the corresponding skill's scripts/ directory

Step 4: Report

Tell the user exactly what was merged and where.

Prompted by other skills

After law-write or law-revise sessions that add citations, ask: "You added N new citations. Upstream them to the global bib?"

The user can say yes, no, or "later." Do not push.

Scripts

scripts/upstream-bib.sh — finds new bib entries and handles deduplication
scripts/upstream-claude.sh — diffs CLAUDE.md and strips the narrative section

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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.

2mo ago First seen · 67 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A c913c0465de4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

law-upstream is a skill published in the GitHub repository li-ch/law-skills (11 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 619 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Writing and docs

law-upstream next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
law-upstreamli-ch/law-skills	Skill	11	9d ago	MIT	A	53	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	103	Claude Code