absolute-init

A one-time setup procedure for the Absolute command family, a collection of code-quality and maintenance tools. It detects the project’s technology stack and records preferences in configuration files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when first setting up Absolute in a repository, refreshing changed project conventions, or changing its shared behaviour across projects.
Why use it?
It prevents every later command from repeatedly guessing the project’s conventions and lets those commands follow consistent choices for output, autonomy, testing, and file locations.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/maddhruv/absolute/absolute-init
Any agent
npx skills add maddhruv/absolute --skill absolute-init
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/maddhruv/absolute

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 127 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,108 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 $0.00127 $0.03108
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01554
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00622
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00311

Measured 3d ago against content hash 7c4e9c1a1c1f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

absolute-init 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 3d 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.

skills/absolute-init/SKILL.md · 292 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 292 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

"set up / initialize / configure absolute"). Start your first response with the ⚙️ emoji.

Absolute Init

One-time setup. Detect the project's real conventions, ask a few questions about how you want absolute to behave, then write that to JSON config the other ten commands read on every run. Result: commands stop re-detecting your stack from scratch and respect your preferences (output style, gating, TDD strictness) without being told each time.

This is the only command that writes config. It is non-destructive: an existing config is shown and updated, never blindly overwritten. It never commits.


When to use

  • First time using absolute in a repo — gives every command cached conventions + your preferences.
  • Conventions changed (new package manager, new test/lint scripts, branch rename) — re-run to refresh.
  • You want to change how absolute behaves globally (output style, autonomy) across projects.

Other commands run fine without init — they fall back to on-the-fly detection and emit a one-line suggestion to run it. init just makes them faster and tailored.


Key principles

  1. Codebase before questions. Detect everything detectable first. Only ask what the repo can't tell you (preferences, ambiguous choices).
  2. A few questions, not a grill. ~4-6 max, one at a time. This is setup, not design review.
  3. Non-destructive. Existing config → show it, confirm each change, merge — don't clobber.
  4. Never auto-commit. Write the project file; tell the user to commit it. (Commit policy itself is not configurable — absolute never commits.)
  5. Two levels, project wins. Project config is team-shared and authoritative; global is your personal default + per-project overrides.

Step 1 — DETECT

Auto-detect the stack using the Codebase Convention Detection table in references/work.md (package manager, language/runtime, test runner, linter/formatter, build, CI, available scripts). Resolve each to the project's own script form (npm test, make lint) so cached commands match CI — not raw tools.

Read the full file on GitHub · 292 lines

Files

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.

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. 3d ago First seen · 292 lines · 127 tokens per session scan A 7c4e9c1a1c1f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

absolute-init is a skill published in the GitHub repository maddhruv/absolute (209 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 127 tokens to every session and 3,108 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.