new-reference

A workflow for adding one researched reference to an existing contextualizer, a tool that organizes source material for later use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to propose a new reference file and update the contextualizer's catalogue before applying the changes.
Why use it?
It avoids the larger discovery process when the topic and source are already known.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,721 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 $0.00033 $0.01721
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00860
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00344
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00172

Measured 2d ago against content hash 05d2ac9e64c6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

new-reference 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/new-reference/SKILL.md · 139 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

New reference

Create a new primary reference file from scratch and wire it into the navigator's catalog. Use this when a single topic has been identified ahead of time and a full discover pass would be overkill.

The proposal stages (into $CTX_PROPOSED/, never the live tree):

  • A new file under references/<source-slug>-<topic>.md (the reference itself) — manifest status added.
  • A new row in the navigator's catalog table at SKILL.md pointing at that reference — manifest status modified (the live SKILL.md is copied into $CTX_PROPOSED/ copy-on-write, then the row is added there).

It does NOT write to research/.research-state.json — that file is a binary setup marker only. If the new reference covers a topic from an as-yet-unregistered source, the source is added to research/source-paths.json (status modified, same copy-on-write seed) as part of the same proposal. Every other file in the contextualizer is recorded unchanged. The whole proposal lands live only when the user runs /skill-engine:apply <name>.

For kind: git-managed sources, the proposed entry follows the same omit-on-default convention as engine-bootstrap Step 2.4: branch is recorded only when the contextualizer follows a non-default branch (dev, nonprod, release/v2); absent ⇒ HEAD. NEW does not prompt for a branch at registration time — the maintainer can supply "branch": "<name>" in the proposed entry directly during the approval gesture, or edit source-paths.json after approval. Field schema and regex enforcement: 02-artifact-contract.md §"source-paths.json entry shape".

For web-doc sources, citations pin three values: source_url (from the fetched URL), content_hash (sha256(file)[:8]), and crawl_date (ISO-8601 UTC). The cache path is the model's read path but is NOT the citation target — a reviewer on a different machine verifies by re-fetching the URL and comparing content_hash.

Contextualizer root

Read the full file on GitHub · 139 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. 2d ago First seen · 139 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 05d2ac9e64c6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

new-reference is a skill published in the GitHub repository nick-railsback/skill-engine (2 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,721 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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