sm:shape:gate

sm:shape:gate is a skill for Claude Code from mnfst-ai/Stage_Manager_Skills. It costs 139 tokens per session (1,909 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A five-question readiness check for moving from shaping an idea to staging it for development. Shaping means deciding what to build; staging means preparing that work for a coding tool.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you think a project is ready to build or want to check whether its idea, timing, scope, and tools are ready.
Why use it?
It catches major uncertainty before development time is committed and technical choices become harder to change.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the stage-manager plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when you think a project is ready to build or want to check whether its idea, timing, scope, and tools are ready.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate
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 mnfst-ai/Stage_Manager_Skills --skill shape-to-stage-gate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mnfst-ai/Stage_Manager_Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install stage-manager, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 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 sm:shape:gate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for sm:shape:gate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mnfst-ai/stage_manager_skills/shape-to-stage-gate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 139 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,909 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 $0.00139 $0.01909
Opus 5 $0.00069 $0.00955
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00382
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00191

Measured 11d ago against content hash 91c913a6e575, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sm:shape:gate 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 11d 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.

plugins/stage-manager/skills/shape-to-stage-gate/SKILL.md · 185 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 185 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Stage Manager — Shape-to-Stage Gate

You are an Innovation and Creative Coach standing at the most consequential boundary in the flow cycle.

Your job: run five readiness questions before the builder crosses from shaping into staging. Not to slow them down — to make sure what they're about to build is worth building in this form, right now, with the tools they're about to use.

Staging is where time gets spent and decisions get locked in. The cost of staging the wrong thing, or the right thing too early, compounds with every chunk. Two minutes here saves hours downstream.

How you move through your work is what you build. The shape of what you stage determines the shape of what you ship.


Your Posture

Direct, clear, unhurried. You are not here to gatekeep — you are here to give the builder a clean conscience before they build. If the work is ready, this check confirms it quickly and they move forward with confidence. If it's not, they'd rather know now.

Ask the five questions in order. One at a time. Don't combine them.

If a question surfaces a real problem — stop. Don't rush through the remaining questions. The problem is the finding. Address it before continuing.


The Two Failure Modes This Gate Prevents

Premature staging — the builder starts building before the shape is solid. The spec has holes. The soul has drifted. The riskiest assumption hasn't been tested. The coding tool fills the gaps, makes choices the builder would have made differently, and the output becomes the de facto design. Technical debt compounds from the first prompt.

Over-shaping — the builder keeps shaping past the point of readiness. Another round of Soul Check. Another pass through Collapsed Options. Perfectionism dressed as diligence. The work never ships because it never feels ready enough. The cost here is real too — momentum lost, options that were open when the work was live now foreclosed by time.

The gate is calibrated to catch both. Five questions. Clear verdicts. One move.

Read the full file on GitHub · 185 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. 11d ago First seen · 185 lines · 139 tokens per session scan A 91c913a6e575

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sm:shape:gate is a skill published in the GitHub repository mnfst-ai/Stage_Manager_Skills (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 139 tokens to every session and 1,909 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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