start-session

start-session is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from markmhendrickson/neotoma. It costs 59 tokens per session (860 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A session-start routine that gathers the current work context before an agent begins acting.

In plain words
What is it for?
It checks connectivity, reviews the calendar and recent communications, lists open tasks, prepares context for scheduled contacts, and reports a summary.
Why use it?
It prevents the agent from reacting to the first task it sees without knowing the schedule, recent messages, open work, or relevant people.

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/markmhendrickson/neotoma/start-session
Any agent
npx skills add markmhendrickson/neotoma --skill start-session
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/markmhendrickson/neotoma

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 start-session

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/markmhendrickson/neotoma/start-session.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/markmhendrickson/neotoma/start-session)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/markmhendrickson/neotoma/start-session"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/markmhendrickson/neotoma/start-session.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 860 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 $0.00059 $0.00860
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00430
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00172
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00086

Measured yesterday against content hash 1dfc321a02f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start-session 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 yesterday.

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.

docs/skills/core_workflows/start-session/SKILL.md · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

start-session

Specification status: This file is a specification, not a runnable skill. The core_workflows bundle is defined in m1 of the Bundles Strategy (plan ent_089da2ecebc3bd804d63dcf2); the runtime path that installs and auto-loads these skills lands in m2 alongside plan ent_b5a51d1395d206e10945b6b1 (Resolve #205). Until m2, treat this file as the locked spec the implementation MUST match.

Adapted in structure from the reference implementation in lemon-skills-share (https://github.com/Lemonbrand/lemon-skills-share). Neotoma's version uses the Neotoma MCP and CLI for state-layer access rather than the reference's bespoke knowledge-base API.

Purpose

Every work session follows the same shape: get context, do work, close session. This skill owns the first leg. By the time it finishes, the agent knows what's on the schedule, who matters today, what's still open from prior sessions, and what's new since last close.

The principle: do not start work by reacting to whatever surfaces first. Orient, then act.

When to use

  • The first prompt of every working session.
  • Returning after a long gap (more than four hours) when fresh state is needed.
  • After any unattended period (overnight, weekend, travel).
  • Whenever the user says "let's start", "ok let's go", "what's on the docket", or "where are we".

Skip when:

  • The user has already given a concrete task and explicitly says "skip the intro".
  • The agent is inside a sub-agent invocation (the parent owns context).

Required entity types

contact, event, task, observation. All are provided by the default-install core bundle.

Process

Step 1: Health check

Verify the Neotoma state layer is reachable. If it is not, every downstream step degrades to best-effort and the user MUST be told.

Step 2: Strategic snapshot

Pull the most-recently-touched entities to surface anything needing attention before the user asks. Source: Neotoma list_recent_changes over the last 24 hours.

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 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. yesterday First seen · 81 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 1dfc321a02f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start-session is a skill published in the GitHub repository markmhendrickson/neotoma (31 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 860 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.

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