study-repos-first

study-repos-first is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills. It costs 158 tokens per session (2,283 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A practice of collecting and pinning relevant outside repositories, specifications, papers, or implementations before making a technical decision. Pinning means storing an exact version so the reference does not change unexpectedly.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when researching how other projects handle a technical domain, adding references to a study, or deciding on naming, folder layouts, data shapes, or communication rules.
Why use it?
It gives developers concrete prior examples to study instead of relying only on memory or assumptions about conventions, file formats, schemas, or protocols.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Good fit Use it when researching how other projects handle a technical domain, adding references to a study, or deciding on naming, folder layouts, data shapes, or communication rules.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first
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 lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills --skill study-repos-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/lossless-group/lossless-agent-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.

agentmods badge for study-repos-first

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first/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 study-repos-first

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills/study-repos-first.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 158 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,283 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00158 $0.02283
Opus 5 $0.00079 $0.01141
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00457
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00228

Measured 12d ago against content hash d8d0944935ed, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

study-repos-first 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 12d 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.

study-repos-first/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Study Repos First

A study is a curated reference collection — a directory of upstream specs, prior art, reference implementations, papers, or codebases — pinned as git submodules before a decision is made or a feature is built. It is not a project (it ships nothing) and not documentation (it lives, it's checked-out code). It is a reading list with structure, pinned so it never rots out from under us.

This skill is foundational and iterative. It will be expanded as we work through real studies together. Treat the contents as the current best understanding, not the final word.

When to use this skill

  • Starting any task in ai-labs/ (or any pseudomonorepo) where the question is about conventions — naming, file shapes, folder layouts, schemas, protocols, manifest formats — rather than novel logic
  • The user says "let's study X", "what's the prior art on X", "how do other projects handle X", "pin a reference", "add a submodule under studies/"
  • A design decision is on the table and the temptation is to let the agent fill in patterns from training data
  • Scaffolding a new studies/<topic-slug>/ directory
  • Adding a reference to an existing study (new submodule, README update)
  • Deciding whether a study has outgrown a subdirectory and should be promoted to its own repo (the lossless-group/study-<slug> pattern)
  • Reading from a study to ground a current implementation question

The behavioral core (this is the actual skill)

Don't paraphrase from training data when pinned upstream code is — or could be — one cd away.

When a domain question comes up:

  1. Check if a study already covers it. Look in ai-labs/studies/ (and any studies/ directory walking up the tree). If a study exists, read from the pinned submodules, not from memory.
  2. If no study exists and the question is meaningful, propose one. Frame the question first; pick a slug; set up the directory.
  3. Cite findings with file pathsstudies/<topic>/<repo>/<file>:<line> — so the user can jump to the upstream source.
  4. Do not summarize or paraphrase upstream specs into prose unless asked. The upstream repo is the artifact. A paragraph paraphrasing llms.txt is a hot take that will rot.

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 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. 12d ago First seen · 123 lines · 158 tokens per session scan A d8d0944935ed

Subscribe to this mod's changes

study-repos-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository lossless-group/lossless-agent-skills (4 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 158 tokens to every session and 2,283 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.

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