thoughts-management

A tool for managing a project’s thoughts/ folder, where research, plans, and notes are stored.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating a new thoughts/ directory and collecting Git and project information for research or implementation-plan documents.
Why use it?
It avoids setting up that folder structure by hand and keeps document details such as the current Git branch and commit consistent.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the stepwise-core plugin — 13 skills, 5 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/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/thoughts-management
Any agent
npx skills add nikeyes/stepwise-dev --skill thoughts-management
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nikeyes/stepwise-dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install stepwise-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 5 agents.

Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 919 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 $0.00919
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00460
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00184
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00092

Measured 3d ago against content hash 61bb663d13a1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

thoughts-management 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 3d 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.

core/skills/thoughts-management/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Thoughts Directory Management

Manage the thoughts/ directory system for organizing research, plans, and notes.

When to use this Skill

Use this Skill automatically in these situations:

  • When gathering metadata for document frontmatter (git commit, branch, author)
  • When initializing a new project that needs thoughts/ structure

Available operations

Initialize thoughts directory

Creates the complete thoughts/ directory structure in the current project.

When to use:

  • First time setting up thoughts/ in a new project
  • When thoughts/ directory doesn't exist

Command:

bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/thoughts-management/scripts/thoughts-init

What it does:

  • Creates directory structure: {username}/, shared/
  • Creates initial README.md

Generate metadata

Generates git and project metadata for document frontmatter.

When to use:

  • Before creating research document frontmatter
  • Before creating implementation plan frontmatter
  • When you need current git commit, branch, repository info
  • When you need timestamp information

Command:

bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/thoughts-management/scripts/thoughts-metadata

Output format:

Current Date/Time (TZ): 2025-01-12 14:30:45 PST
ISO DateTime: 2025-01-12T14:30:45-0800
Date Short: 2025-01-12
Current Git Commit Hash: abc123def456
Current Branch Name: main
Repository Name: my-project
Git User: John Doe
Git Email: [email protected]
Timestamp For Filename: 2025-01-12_14-30-45

Use this metadata to populate:

  • Research document frontmatter fields
  • Implementation plan frontmatter fields
  • Any document requiring git context

Workflow integration

Metadata collection workflow

  1. Need to create document with frontmatter
  2. Gather metadata:
    bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/thoughts-management/scripts/thoughts-metadata
    
  3. Use output to populate YAML frontmatter fields
  4. Create the document

Directory structure

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 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. 3d ago First seen · 142 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 61bb663d13a1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

thoughts-management is a skill published in the GitHub repository nikeyes/stepwise-dev (24 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 919 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 2026-08-30.

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