adr-author

adr-author is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from microsoft/hve-core. It costs 55 tokens per session (3,616 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided method for writing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), short documents that capture important technical choices and the reasons behind them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to capture or adopt architecture decisions, choose a Y-Statement or MADR format, evaluate architecture-significant-change triggers, and produce a final ADR with its project lineage.
Why use it?
It provides a consistent way to record decisions, connect replacements or superseded decisions, and start from either user input, a planner's handoff, or an existing template.

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/microsoft/hve-core/adr-author
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/hve-core --skill adr-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/hve-core

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 adr-author

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/adr-author.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/adr-author)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/adr-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/adr-author.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,616 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 $0.03616
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01808
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00723
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00362

Measured 4d ago against content hash 7cd3e53eed8a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adr-author 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 17 executable files (scripts/__init__.py, scripts/_utils.py, scripts/normalize_template.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.github/skills/project-planning/adr-author/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

adr-author

Overview

This skill encodes the per-phase authoring conventions for Architecture Decision Records consumed by the ADR Creator agent. It also supports direct invocation when no ADR Creator state file exists. Direct callers first run the session recovery and bootstrap protocol from adr-identity.instructions.md: resolve or create .copilot-tracking/adr-plans/{projectSlug}/state.json, confirm entryMode, projectSlug, and outputTemplate, then continue at the phase recorded in state. It supports three entry modes and two output templates and converges all of them at the Govern phase, where the final ADR file is written and lineage is updated atomically.

Entry modes (state.entryMode):

  • capture — Interactive authoring driven by user answers to Frame and Decide questions.
  • from-planner-handoff — Entry from an upstream planner (Security, RAI, SSSC) with pre-populated Frame fields. Frame still requires user confirmation before exit.
  • adopt-template — One-time setup mode that ingests a project's pre-existing ADR template and emits both the first ADR and a committed .adr-config.yml.

Output templates (state.outputTemplate):

  • y-statement — Compact Y-Statement-shaped ADR for low-stakes or reversible decisions. Compressed Frame; ASR triggers optional.
  • madr-v4 — Long-form MADR v4.0.0 ADR for architecturally significant decisions. ASR trigger evaluation required during Frame.

Entry mode and output template are independent: a from-planner-handoff session can target either y-statement or madr-v4, and a capture session can do the same. The adopt-template mode produces output shaped by the user's normalized template.

Lifecycle at a glance:

Mode Phase sequence Output
capture Frame → Decide → Govern Shaped by outputTemplate (y-statement or madr-v4)
from-planner-handoff Frame (confirm pre-populated) → Decide → Govern Shaped by outputTemplate (y-statement or madr-v4)
adopt-template Ingest → Normalize → Derive Questions → Fill → Govern First ADR + .adr-config.yml per the BYO contract

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 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. 4d ago First seen · 180 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 7cd3e53eed8a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adr-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,422 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 3,616 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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