absolute-work

absolute-work is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from maddhruv/absolute. It costs 104 tokens per session (5,009 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A phase-by-phase software development process for coding agents, covering discussion, specification, task planning, implementation, testing, and final cleanup. TDD, or test-driven development, means checking work with tests written before or alongside the code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for features, bug fixes, refactors, new projects, planning breakdowns, and migrations that need reviewed requirements, ordered tasks, testing, and verification.
Why use it?
It prevents an agent from starting implementation while the requested behaviour is still unclear. Approval checkpoints also keep each phase and execution wave under the user's control.

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

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 absolute-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maddhruv/absolute/absolute-work.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/maddhruv/absolute/absolute-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/maddhruv/absolute/absolute-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/maddhruv/absolute/absolute-work.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 104 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,009 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00104 $0.05009
Opus 5 $0.00052 $0.02505
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.01002
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00501

Measured 3d ago against content hash 6e0bdca0ebef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

absolute-work scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

4. **How to test it** — end every session with concrete, copy-pasteable steps the user can run to exercise the added functionality themselves: the exact commands to start the app/script, the inputs or routes to hit (`cur
skills/absolute-work/SKILL.md · 409 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 409 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Start your first response with the 🛠️ emoji.

Absolute Work: End-to-End AI Development Lifecycle

Absolute Work takes any unit of work — a ticket, a task, a plan, a migration — from fuzzy intent to verified code. It is one continuous skill with hard gates between phases: brainstorm a shared design, write and review a spec, decompose into a dependency-graphed task board, then peel tasks off one safe wave at a time with test-first verification. Nothing is assumed, nothing is silently expanded, and no code is written until the design is approved.

The lifecycle has 6 phases: INTAKE & BRAINSTORM → SPEC → DECOMPOSE & PLAN → EXECUTE → VERIFY → CONVERGE


The Phase Gate Rule

Absolute Work STOPS at the end of every phase and waits for the user's explicit "go" before advancing. This is non-negotiable. The phases are:

INTAKE & BRAINSTORM ─┃ gate ┃─ SPEC ─┃ gate ┃─ DECOMPOSE & PLAN ─┃ gate ┃─ EXECUTE ─┃ gate per wave ┃─ VERIFY ─┃ gate ┃─ CONVERGE

At each gate, present what was produced, summarize what comes next, and ask the user to confirm before proceeding. Never chain two phases without an approval in between. Use AskUserQuestion (where available) for every gate and every interview question.


Activation Protocol

Immediately after the banner, enter plan mode before doing anything else:

  1. On platforms with native plan mode (e.g. Claude Code's EnterPlanMode): invoke it immediately.
  2. On platforms without it: simulate plan mode — complete INTAKE & BRAINSTORM and SPEC fully, write no code, and get explicit approval before EXECUTE.

The first three phases are planning work. No files are created or modified (other than the spec and the board) until the user approves the task graph and execution begins.


Session Resume Protocol

When Absolute Work is invoked and a .absolute-work/board.md already exists in the project root:

  1. Detect: Read the board and determine its status.
  2. Display: Print a compact summary of completed / in-progress / blocked / remaining tasks.
  3. Resume: Pick up from the last incomplete wave — do NOT restart from INTAKE.
  4. Reconcile: If the codebase changed since the last session, diff against the board's expected state and flag conflicts before resuming.

Read the full file on GitHub · 409 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 409 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A 6e0bdca0ebef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

absolute-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository maddhruv/absolute (209 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 5,009 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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