pstack-claude is a set of opinionated coding-agent skills and workflows ported from Cursor to Claude Code, Codex, Pi, and other agent harnesses. It guides agents toward concise, simple, and verified code by routing goals to suitable workflows and supporting subagent tools. The catalogue entries are the project's skills, agents, hook, and plugin implementations for these agent environments.
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.
npx skills add michael-denyer/pstack-claude --skill whygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claudeWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/why)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/why"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/why/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/why"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michael-denyer/pstack-claude/why.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk warn
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00089 | $0.02386 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00036 | $0.00954 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00477 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00239 |
Grade A, and why
why 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Why
On Codex, read the platform mapping, including its per-skill notes, before following this skill.
On GitHub Copilot, read the platform mapping, including its per-skill notes, before following this skill.
On Muse, read the platform mapping, including its per-skill notes, before following this skill.
Investigate the motivation and intent behind code. The companion how skill answers what the code does and how it works. why answers what forces led to its shape.
Each spawn below names a role line in pstack-models.md and a default in Models. Set model to that line's value, or to the default if the sheet or the line is missing. Leave model unset when the value is auto or inherit-parent. If the Agent tool rejects a slug, use the default and say so. If it rejects the default, use the closest valid slug of the same family from its error message. Pick each subagent's reasoning level for the job, per the Subagents section of the poteto-mode skill.
Every spawn is general-purpose with readonly: false (agent mode). Do not use readonly/Ask mode. It strips MCP access, which disables the MCP-backed investigators and the synthesizer's citation spot-checks. Investigators still shouldn't write anything.
Operating Posture
Operate as a careful, cautious, and precise investigator. Be honest about what you know vs what you're inferring. Read references/epistemics.md for the full confidence framework and phrasing guide. The synthesizer must follow it.
Step 1. Understand the Target and the Question
The target is usually a chunk of code, a pattern, a feature, or a named design decision. The question is usually a design rationale, a tradeoff, a motivating edge case, an external constraint, dead code, or a broad history sweep.
If the target is vague ("why do we do it this way?" with no clear referent), make your best guess from conversation context (open files, recent edits, cursor location, what was just discussed). State your interpretation briefly so the user can redirect if you're off, then proceed.
What ships with it
12 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.
- references/epistemics.md 7.8 KB
- references/investigator-prompt.md 5.7 KB
- references/source-playbook.md 1.3 KB
- references/sources/code-archaeology.md 1.4 KB
- references/sources/databricks.md 6.8 KB
- references/sources/datadog.md 4.9 KB
- references/sources/incident-postmortem.md 372 B
- references/sources/linear.md 2.9 KB
- references/sources/notion.md 2.8 KB
- references/sources/sentry.md 2.0 KB
- references/sources/slack.md 1.3 KB
- references/synthesizer-prompt.md 7.3 KB
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.
- yesterday Changed · +2 lines 0547728389d5
- 6d ago Changed cc2bfd40a4f3
- 9d ago Changed · -60 lines c536ba59451d
- 16d ago Changed · +2 lines af1489a1dbd0
- 26d ago Changed · +4 lines 2920a63da793
- 28d ago Changed · +2 lines a4bf262d3f41
- 29d ago Changed 0ec9a0c83790
- 1mo ago Changed · -75 lines 0691b6378ee2
- 1mo ago Changed 326cd9a7e495
- 1mo ago First seen · 240 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A ee7e1e2f9846
why is a skill published in the GitHub repository michael-denyer/pstack-claude (3,246 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 2,386 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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