engine-bootstrap

engine-bootstrap is a skill for Claude Code from nick-railsback/skill-engine. It costs 29 tokens per session (1,886 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A setup tool for creating a new source-context skill from website addresses or local file paths. It detects required details and creates the initial project files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Starting a new source-context project from a list of URLs or local paths, then handing off to the next research workflow.
Why use it?
It removes the need to manually create the folders and starter files before researching a new set of sources.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the skill-engine plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Starting a new source-context project from a list of URLs or local paths, then handing off to the next research workflow.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap
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 nick-railsback/skill-engine --skill engine-bootstrap
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nick-railsback/skill-engine

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skill-engine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 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 engine-bootstrap

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap/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 engine-bootstrap

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nick-railsback/skill-engine/engine-bootstrap.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,886 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 $0.00029 $0.01886
Opus 5.5 $0.00012 $0.00754
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00006 $0.00377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00189

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 0568b17d6078, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

engine-bootstrap 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 1mo 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/engine-bootstrap/SKILL.md · 170 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 170 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Engine bootstrap

Scaffold a new contextualizer in the current directory. Take a list of source URLs or local paths from the user, auto-detect the metadata the engine needs, stamp the matching template set into place, and exit with a 3-line message naming the next workflow to run.

The user supplies sources. The engine fills in everything else.

Installation layout

A contextualizer is stamped as a self-contained Claude Code project skill at:

.claude/skills/<slug>-context/
├── SKILL.md
├── verify.sh
├── research/
│   ├── source-paths.json
│   └── .research-state.json
└── references/   (created by /skill-engine:discover later)

.claude/skills/<slug>-context/ is the contextualizer root. Every engine workflow (discover, refresh, status, self-audit, new-reference, using-skill-engine) resolves research/..., references/..., and verify.sh relative to this root. The user invokes slash commands from the project working directory (the parent of .claude/); the workflows locate the root themselves.

Step 1 — Intake

Accept one or more sources: positional arguments (straight to Step 2) or, with none supplied, an interactive loop reading pasted URLs/paths until the literal word finish. --sources-file <path> plus --branch-default-all batch-intake many sources at once. Recognition table, disambiguator, edge case, and the batch-intake flags are in references/intake-and-detection.md.

Step 2 — Auto-detection

For each accepted source, compute id, kind, and topology (single- vs multi-source) without prompting — monorepo detection is deferred to DISCOVER. Exact slug-derivation rules per input shape are in references/intake-and-detection.md.

Step 2.4 — Confirm branch (git-managed sources only)

Ask once per git-managed source which branch to monitor; non-git sources skip this entirely. Omitting the field on a default answer (rather than recording an explicit main) keeps the entry correct if the default branch is later renamed. Prompt copy and response handling are in references/intake-and-detection.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 170 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 1mo ago Changed · -8 lines scan B → A 0568b17d6078
  2. 1mo ago First seen · 178 lines · 29 tokens per session scan B a8291a3cd274

Subscribe to this mod's changes

engine-bootstrap is a skill published in the GitHub repository nick-railsback/skill-engine (2 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,886 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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