scope-hammer

scope-hammer is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin. It costs 177 tokens per session (2,532 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A Shape Up stop-decision skill for reviewing unfinished work when time or attempt limits run out. It compares the result with the current product baseline and decides what must remain, what can be cut, and whether to ship.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the end of a Shape Up build to make a must-have list, create a baseline-based cut list, and issue a ship verdict.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from continuing to build just because the result is less polished than imagined. It gathers findings from testing, discovered tasks, and exhausted work limits into one clear decision.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the shapeup-sdlc-plugin plugin — 17 skills, 11 commands, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it at the end of a Shape Up build to make a must-have list, create a baseline-based cut list, and issue a ship verdict.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin/scope-hammer
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 nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin --skill scope-hammer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install shapeup-sdlc-plugin, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 skills, 11 commands, 4 hooks.

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 scope-hammer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin/scope-hammer.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin/scope-hammer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin/scope-hammer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin/scope-hammer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 177 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,532 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 $0.00177 $0.02532
Opus 5 $0.00088 $0.01266
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00506
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00253

Measured 7d ago against content hash 9be1c29eb013, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scope-hammer 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/scope-hammer/SKILL.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Scope Hammer (GATE H — Decide When to Stop)

The mechanism behind Shape Up step 11: as the appetite/round budget runs out, cut back on perfectionist ambitions by comparing the actual product to the baseline — what customers live with today — not to a hypothetical perfect version. "Better than the baseline" is good enough to ship; "not as good as I imagined" is not a reason to keep building.

Why this is its own skill, not tech-lead prose. GATE H census pulls from several sources that accumulate over a whole run (QA findings, discovered-task ledger, attempt-budget overflows, per-scope inner-breaker trips) — a genuinely separate synthesis step from orchestration. Splitting it out keeps tech-lead thin (it dispatches, this skill decides what survives the hammer) and gives the census/cut-list/verdict logic one owner instead of being re-derived inline at every SHIP.


When this fires

1. All scopes reach FINISHED on the hill → normal stop, post-QA-hunt.
2. Outer circuit breaker trips: round_budget reaches 0 with scopes still uphill/downhill.
3. Inner circuit breaker trips: a scope's attempt_budget (default 5) is exhausted without a
   T0-green result → queued as a hammer PROPOSAL (`hammer_proposals`),
   judged here rather than immediately blocking the round.

Any of the three routes to this skill; the difference is only what's in the census (case 1 has no unresolved scopes; cases 2/3 do, and those become explicit CUT or CARRY candidates below).


Workflow

INPUT: run's finished/unfinished scopes + baseline + census sources
          │
⏸ GATE H0 │  Census ──────────────► collect every open item, classify must-have / nice-to-have
          │
⏸ GATE H1 │  Baseline Comparison ──► for each unresolved must-have, is the product still
          │                          better than the baseline without it?
          │
⏸ GATE H2 │  Cut List & Verdict ───► propose cuts (PO confirms), ship / carry-to-next-cycle verdict
          │
✅ Done   └─► cut list + verdict handed to tech-lead SHIP; PO owns the final call

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 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 · 187 lines · 177 tokens per session scan A 9be1c29eb013

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scope-hammer is a skill published in the GitHub repository nguyenvanphituoc/shapeup-sdlc-plugin (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 177 tokens to every session and 2,532 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.