day-start

A daily journal briefing that reviews a chosen day, its week, and recent entries, then helps set direction. It can cover a future day or revisit a past one.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review what happened, see goals and plans, check recent progress, and decide what to focus on for the selected day.
Why use it?
It gathers scattered journal context into one short starting point, so you can begin planning without searching through entries yourself.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the journal plugin — 8 skills, 1 agent shipped together

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/mpazik/binder/day-start
Any agent
npx skills add mpazik/Binder --skill day-start
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mpazik/Binder

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install journal, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 1 agent.

Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,023 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 $0.00016 $0.01023
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00511
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00205
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00102

Measured 3d ago against content hash c7ea9f6626b7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

day-start 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 3d 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.

examples/journal/skills/day-start/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Deliver a focused day briefing. Get me moving in under 3 minutes. This may run hours after waking — don't assume it's the first thing in the day.

Context

Offset controls direction: proactive (positive or default — briefing days ahead) or retroactive (negative — briefing a past day).

Target day = the day being briefed (offset $0). Always read its date from the entry below — never assume it's "today."

Target day entry (we are briefing this — created if missing):

!O=$0; binder read $(bun scripts/journal.ts d ${O:-0} --key) --format yaml

Week context:

!O=$0; binder read $(bun scripts/journal.ts w ${O:-0} --key) -f "weekPeriod,goal,plan,achievements" --format yaml

Extra context

Calendar events and health data are injected automatically by the data-sync extension. Use them if present.

Recent days:

!binder search type=JournalDay "dayPeriod>=$(date -v-7d +%Y-%m-%d)" -f "dayPeriod,plan,achievements,summary,moodScore,sleepScore,foodScore,workScore,fitnessScore,totalScore" --format yaml

Deliver the briefing FIRST (no questions)

Open with a short recap. Format:

Previous day: [1-2 sentence summary of what happened + key outcome. Include the highlight if one was captured — e.g. "Best part: nailed the demo."] This week: [week goal] — [progress based on achievements so far] Momentum: [streaks, positive trends, and recent achievements, e.g. "Gym 4 days straight. Work score up from 5→7. Shipped frontmatter parser yesterday."]

4 lines max. Focus on momentum and context, not rehashing failures. If the previous day was rough, acknowledge briefly and move on: "Fresh day. Here's what's ahead."

Then ask — one combined message

Propose scores from health data

If healthData contains sleep data, propose a sleep score in the briefing — don't ask about sleep. Use recent days' sleep data and scores as calibration (e.g. if 8.3h scored 8, and today is 7.0h with low deep sleep, propose 6). Show your reasoning briefly:

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 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. 3d ago First seen · 97 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A c7ea9f6626b7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

day-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository mpazik/Binder (40 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 1,023 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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