express

express is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nicknisi/ideation. It costs 129 tokens per session (498 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A faster route through an idea-to-plan workflow for work whose scope is already reasonably understood.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you want to run ideation with one consolidated approval and immediately generate the project contract and specifications.
Why use it?
It keeps the initial interview and evidence checks but removes repeated approval pauses before producing the agreed planning documents.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the ideation plugin — 7 skills, 3 agents 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/nicknisi/ideation/express
Any agent
npx skills add nicknisi/ideation --skill express
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nicknisi/ideation

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ideation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 3 agents.

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 express

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicknisi/ideation/express.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/ideation/express)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/ideation/express"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicknisi/ideation/express.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 129 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 498 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 $0.00129 $0.00498
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00100
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00050

Measured 4d ago against content hash 9c67f5935526, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

express 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 4d 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/express/SKILL.md · 28 lines

What it actually says

Express Ideation

Express is a pre-commit of /ideation's post-interview routing — same interview, same critics, same artifacts (contract-data.json, specs, generator-rendered contract.html + contract.md via --md-output); the only difference is that the express finish is chosen here, up front, instead of at the routing question.

  1. Clean-tree check — now, before the interview. Run git status --porcelain. Uncommitted changes would ride along on phase commits, and stopping costs one question here, not a completed interview. Dirty tree → ask: stash/commit first, accept the risk, or abort. A clean tree proceeds silently.
  2. Run ideation. Read and follow ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/ideation/SKILL.md end to end with the routing question pre-answered to "Approve — express finish" (fold the run-mode question into the approval call, and skip the routing-time clean-tree check — it already ran above). Everything else — branch handling, resume semantics, strict fail-closed execution, completion lines — lives in ideation's Express finish path, the single owner of express semantics.
  3. Scope guard (advisory). For exploratory or unfamiliar work, recommend the full /ideation flow instead — its evidence-derived routing recommendation makes the same call, with reasons.
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. 4d ago First seen · 28 lines · 129 tokens per session scan A 9c67f5935526

Subscribe to this mod's changes

express is a skill published in the GitHub repository nicknisi/ideation (12 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 129 tokens to every session and 498 once invoked, about $0.0006 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens