apply

A controlled step for moving a reviewed proposal into the live contextualizer, the system that supplies working context to an agent.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after a proposal has passed the required review and sign-off checks. It validates the manifest and review record before applying the files.
Why use it?
It prevents unapproved or incomplete proposals from changing the live setup and keeps the review record with the change.

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/nick-railsback/skill-engine/apply
Any agent
npx skills add nick-railsback/skill-engine --skill apply
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nick-railsback/skill-engine

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 929 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 $0.00036 $0.00929
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00464
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00093

Measured 2d ago against content hash 101f406ef503, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apply 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 2d 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.

plugin/skill-engine/skills/apply/SKILL.md · 59 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 59 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apply

Promote a reviewed proposal into the live contextualizer. Atomic-rename per file. Preserve the REVIEW.md audit trail in the live tree. Refuse to run when the proposal has not been signed off, when the sign-off is reject, or when more than one Step 3 box is ticked.

When to invoke

After /skill-engine:review <name> has run, the user has filled Step 1 of REVIEW.md, re-run review to populate Step 2, ticked verdict boxes on each disagreement (optional — for the engine's own read; the engine does not consume these), and ticked exactly one Step 3 box (reviewed or provisional).

Resolving <name> and <install>

Same resolution as /skill-engine:review: <name> is the slug without the -context suffix; bare invocation works when exactly one *-context.proposed/ exists under <install>. See review/SKILL.md § Resolving <name> for the full rule.

Pre-promotion gates

Run these in order; any failure halts the apply and exits non-zero without mutating either tree: the manifest exists and parses, REVIEW.md exists and parses, the review loop actually ran (not just a ticked box — two literal-content checks against Step 1/Step 2), exactly one Step 3 box is ticked and it isn't reject, and the live tree hasn't changed since staging (per-entry content-hash comparison against the manifest's sha_before/sha_after). The exact checks, halt messages, and per-status hash rules are in references/pre-promotion-gates.md.

Promotion, review-state and preamble reconciliation

Promote file-by-file from the manifest (resume-safe per entry), then — before moving the audit trail — write research/review-state.json (the persisted sign-off ledger) and reconcile the provisional-mode preamble block in the live SKILL.md, then move REVIEW.md + manifest.json into the live .review/ and remove the emptied proposed directory. The per-status promotion rules, the ledger schema, and the preamble's exact delimiter format and four reconciliation cases are in references/promotion-and-reconciliation.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 59 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 2d ago First seen · 59 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 101f406ef503

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apply is a skill published in the GitHub repository nick-railsback/skill-engine (2 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 929 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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