prepare

A planning workflow that turns a vague work item, called a yak, into a clear specification with acceptance criteria and smaller work items. Acceptance criteria are the conditions that show the work is complete.

In plain words
What is it for?
Fleshing out a feature, preparing requirements, deciding whether work should be split into smaller tasks, and checking related work items and existing code.
Why use it?
It reveals missing details and blockers before implementation starts, so another developer can work from a shared plan.

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/mattwynne/yaks/prepare
Any agent
npx skills add mattwynne/yaks --skill prepare
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattwynne/yaks

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,506 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 $0.00020 $0.02506
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01253
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00501
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00251

Measured yesterday against content hash 7a6d32e5d123, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prepare 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.

plugins/yx/skills/prepare/SKILL.md · 377 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 377 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prepare Skill

You're helping prepare a yak for implementation. This is the bridge between mapping (lightweight structure) and working (hands-on implementation).

Arguments: $ARGUMENTS — the yak name to prepare, or empty to prompt the user.

Goal: Transform a yak from an idea into a well-specified piece of work ready for zero-context implementation.

When to Use This Skill

  • User says "prepare this yak", "spec out X", "flesh out this work", "break down this feature"
  • A yak needs more detail before implementation can start
  • You need to establish acceptance criteria for a yak
  • A yak is too big and needs breaking into sub-yaks

Related skills:

  • /yx:map — for lightweight initial structure and exploration
  • /yx:work — for implementation after preparation is complete

Workflow reference: See ../docs/yak-workflow.dot for the overall yak lifecycle.

The Preparation Flow

1. Read Existing State

Before doing anything else, understand what you're working with:

# Show the yak details
yx show "$ARGUMENTS"

# See the context around it
yx ls

# Check parent and sibling yaks for context

If you need to explore the codebase (understand existing code, find relevant files, assess complexity):

  • Delegate to a subagent — keeps the main conversation clean for spec discussion with the user
  • Use explorers or code-reading agents to gather information
  • Bring back a summary, not a transcript

Ask: Does the user want to answer questions now, or should you gather more context first?

2. Check for @needs-human

If the yak has a @needs-human tag:

yx show "$ARGUMENTS" --format json | jq -r '.tags[]'

Surface it: "This yak has an open question in its context: [question]. Want to answer now, or should I prepare a different yak?"

If answered, remove the tag:

yx untag "$ARGUMENTS" @needs-human

3. Mark Work In Progress

Before making any changes or additions:

yx start "$ARGUMENTS"

Read the full file on GitHub · 377 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 · 377 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 7a6d32e5d123

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prepare is a skill published in the GitHub repository mattwynne/yaks (54 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 2,506 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

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