init

A setup step for preparing MasterMind for a project that is not configured yet. It detects the project’s technology stack and builds a matching set of engineering guidance, asking only for information it cannot infer.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting MasterMind in a project, onboarding an existing codebase, or preparing a new project whose technology and purpose still need to be identified.
Why use it?
It prevents generic guidance from misleading the project and gives later work rules suited to the actual codebase and technology.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mastermind plugin — 23 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mastermind, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 23 skills, 4 agents, 1 hook.

Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,028 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 $0.00055 $0.02028
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01014
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00406
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00203

Measured 3d ago against content hash 6377e168bb12, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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/init/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Initialize: get MasterMind ready for this project, fast

The goal: a new user goes from "installed" to "the brain is set up for my stack and knows what I'm building" in a few quick steps: a handoff, not an intake form. Detect what you can; ask the rest. Run once per project; if this project already built its field, you're set: skip this.

Nothing ships pre-baked. A fresh install carries only the engine and engineering/fields/_template/ no field, because a pack tuned to someone else's stack is worse than none (dead weight that misleads). So init's core job is to build this project's field from the template, tuned to the real stack. This is where the measured quality lift comes from; without it you still apply solid general judgment, but the domain pack is the difference.

Keep it short (the #1 rule)

Detect before asking: read the answers out of the project, and make the technical calls yourself. A developed project needs zero questions: continue with its own stack. A greenfield project needs one open question ("what do you want to build?"), answered in their own words. The whole thing should feel like 20 seconds, then you're working.

Path A: the project already has code

  1. Detect the stack: package.json/lockfile, configs, framework + versions, DB, test runner, folder shape (core/agent-loop.md). This is free, read it rather than asking.
  2. Set up its field:
    • This project already built a field that fits → load it. Done. (Nothing else ships, so this only happens on a re-run of a project that was set up before.)
    • Otherwise: build one from engineering/fields/_template/, tuned to the detected stack: a one-time bootstrap (levelup bootstrap), stated as a trade-off, not a menu: "a few minutes now makes me much sharper on your stack: its real defaults, pitfalls, and review rules. It's once per field, then reused for every task." Build it to fit one real stack, and keep it lean, tailoring prunes as much as it adds (active-field.md). Fill the pack's "Where things are" section from what step 1 already detected: the half-dozen entry-point pointers (components, routes, state, tests + run command, config, the one file that explains the architecture fastest). This is the narrow exception to "skip the directory listing" below: a full tree is re-derivable noise, but these few pointers are what stop every future task from re-running discovery. Then point active-field.md at it and regenerate the router from the brain you are installed into: node .mastermind/scripts/build-router.mjs for a per-project brain, the default. Under --shared the brain is the one in your home directory, so run that same script from there. A bare scripts/… path is the project's own directory and fails with MODULE_NOT_FOUND.
  3. Fill the project brief (.mastermind/brief.md). An isolated install seeds it; under --shared there is no project brain, so create the file yourself at that path. The field pack holds the stack; the brief holds this project: what it is, the words it uses for its own ideas, what breaks and who feels it, what cannot be undone here, and how it ships. Most of it comes from step 1. Ask the user only for what the code cannot tell you, which is usually who feels an outage and which actions are irreversible. Keep it under about 40 lines: it is read every session. This is what stops a change that is technically correct and operationally wrong.
  4. Respect the project: match its conventions and keep the stack it already chose (stack-defaults.md: the project wins).

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 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 · 130 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 6377e168bb12

Subscribe to this mod's changes

init is a skill published in the GitHub repository mehrad-dm/mastermind (24 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 2,028 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 2026-08-30.

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