A guided setup process for a newly copied brain-starter vault, a personal knowledge-base template. It walks through identity, a first project, search, integrations, indexes, and the first commit.

Personalise a fresh brain-starter vault, configure its search and integrations, create indexes, and verify the first setup commit.

It gives a new vault a checked starting configuration and lets the user complete or skip each setup phase independently.

kickoff — Skill for Claude Code by michaeljauk/brain-starter

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/michaeljauk/brain-starter

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff

Made for: Claude Code.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/michaeljauk/brain-starter/kickoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,271 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00080	$0.02271
Opus 5.5	$0.00032	$0.00908
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00016	$0.00454
Haiku 4.5	$0.00008	$0.00227

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 6d796e701891, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

kickoff 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 1mo 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.

.claude/skills/kickoff/SKILL.md · 240 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 240 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Kickoff

Takes a freshly forked brain-starter from empty template to working vault. A preflight check, then six phases, each one independently useful. The user can stop after any phase and still have something better than they started with.

Target: 15 minutes for all six.

Trigger phrases

/kickoff
/kickoff <phase> - run one phase only (identity, project, search, integrations, indexes, commit)
"I just forked brain-starter"
"set up my brain"
"help me personalise this vault"

Contract

These are not style preferences. Breaking one makes the skill worse than no skill.

Every phase is gated. Ask before starting each one. The user may skip any phase, in any order, and skipping is a normal outcome - not a failure.
Every phase verifies its own work with a tool call. An exit code of 0 is not verification. Read the file back. Run the query. Check that a known note comes out. If you did not observe the result, you may not report the phase as done.
Never install anything without asking. Detect, report, offer the command. The user runs it, or approves you running it. This is their machine.
Never invent facts about the user. Everything in CLAUDE.md and knowledge/me.md comes from what they told you in this conversation. An empty section beats a plausible guess.
Progress is saved after every phase to .claude/kickoff-state.json, so an interrupted run resumes instead of restarting.
Re-running is safe. Completed phases report as already done and are skipped unless the user asks to redo one. Never overwrite the user's own edits to a file a previous phase created - read it first, and extend rather than replace.

State file

.claude/kickoff-state.json. Create it on first run. Write it after every phase.

{
  "version": 1,
  "started": "YYYY-MM-DD",
  "phases": {
    "preflight":    { "status": "done",    "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "identity":     { "status": "done",    "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "project":      { "status": "skipped", "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "search":       { "status": "failed",  "at": "YYYY-MM-DD", "note": "qmd not installed" },
    "integrations": { "status": "pending" },
    "indexes":      { "status": "pending" },
    "commit":       { "status": "pending" }
  }
}

Read the full file on GitHub · 240 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.

1mo ago First seen · 240 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 6d796e701891

Subscribe to this mod's changes

kickoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository michaeljauk/brain-starter (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 2,271 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

Claude Code Memory and context ai-tools knowledge-management markdown obsidian obsidian-plugin

pkm-explore

Use when researching what the vault knows about a topic — performs graph + semantic exploration with gap analysis to map existing knowledge and find missing connections. Primarily used via the vault-explorer agent. Not for routine session-start context loading (hooks handle that).

AdrianV101/obsidian-pkm-plugin · 55 tokens

log

Use this when a PersonalOS work session, chat outcome, personal reflection, or provided source should be persisted into the modular Daily context and any already-owned canonical files. Do NOT use for single-call processing, single-source knowledge ingestion, Gmail/WhatsApp propagation, or Lexware booking.

vincentmumme/personalos-boilerplate · 59 tokens

analyse-call

Use this when a local call transcript or meeting note should be analyzed into traceable PersonalOS context. Preserves the source, separates evidence from interpretation, updates only proven owner truth, routes confirmed commitments through task-manager, and never sends messages or triggers external actions without…

vincentmumme/personalos-boilerplate · 58 tokens

kickoff