prep

prep is a skill for Claude Code from mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow. It costs 68 tokens per session (3,610 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An interactive ticket-preparation tool that turns an unclear task into a dispatchable specification. Dispatch means handing the ticket to someone or something else to implement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine a ticket, recommend answers where possible, ask a person about unresolved choices, and leave a complete specification for the next worker. It does not create a worktree, branch, pull request, or implementation.
Why use it?
It finds decisions and unanswered questions before implementation starts, reducing blocked or wasted work. It records the decisions and remaining details in one ticket comment without changing the repository.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the csw plugin — 5 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to examine a ticket, recommend answers where possible, ask a person about unresolved choices, and leave a complete specification for the next worker. It does not create a worktree, branch, pull request, or implementation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow/prep
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.

Any agent
npx skills add mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow --skill prep
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install csw, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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 prep

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow/prep.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow/prep)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow/prep"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow/prep.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,610 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00068 $0.03610
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01805
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00722
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00361

Measured 7d ago against content hash 851fe34972b5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prep 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 7d 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/prep/SKILL.md · 276 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 276 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prep a ticket for dispatch

Announce at start: "Using csw:prep to spec without touching the repo."

Invocation: $ARGUMENTS

A batch loop only compounds after a failure: a ticket blocks, the question lands on the ticket, and the next dispatch starts from a better brief — so one wasted dispatch is the price of every question discovered. Prep moves that discovery in front of the dispatch, where it costs a comment instead of a night.

Prep does not implement anything. It reads, it decides everything it can defend a recommendation for, it asks about the little that survives that test, and it writes one comment carrying all of it.

Prep is an interactive command, and that is the design centre rather than a variant of it. The person who can answer typed the invocation and is sitting there for the whole run, so a run ends in one of two states, both of which leave the ticket dispatchable:

  • Every question that would block an autonomous build has an answer, recorded on the ticket in the run that asked it.
  • There were none, and prep says so.

The second is the common one and the one to aim for. A question left in a comment for someone to notice tomorrow is not a third state — it is the first state, deferred by a day, and that day is exactly what prep exists to remove.

Step 0: Read the config

csw-config json
csw-config path

If csw-config path prints nothing, this repo has no .claude/csw.json. Say so and show the defaults you are about to use. Prep runs nothing destructive, so this is a note rather than a stop — but tracker is the one key it genuinely needs, because it decides where the comment goes.

Step 1: Resolve the ticket

csw-ticket normalize "<the reference from the invocation>"

If the invocation carried no reference, ask which ticket. Do not pick one.

If normalisation exits non-zero, report its message and stop. Prepping the wrong ticket is worse than prepping none: the comment lands somewhere a later dispatch will read it as its brief.

Read the full file on GitHub · 276 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. 7d ago First seen · 276 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 851fe34972b5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prep is a skill published in the GitHub repository mikestankavich/claude-ship-workflow (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 3,610 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 2026-08-31.

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