spine-scan

spine-scan is a skill for Claude Code from Nodewarrior/spine. It costs 39 tokens per session (2,672 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An optional session-start scanner for a Spine vault, a collection of project notes stored in Obsidian, a markdown note-taking application. It checks notes for broken links, missing tags, orphaned documents, and gaps related to recent commits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a session to scan the current project's vault, fix supported issues, and show a non-blocking report when the scanner is enabled.
Why use it?
It helps detect and automatically correct low-risk documentation problems before work begins.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the spine plugin — 7 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it at the start of a session to scan the current project's vault, fix supported issues, and show a non-blocking report when the scanner is enabled.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan
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 Nodewarrior/spine --skill spine-scan
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Nodewarrior/spine

Made for: Claude Code.

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

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 spine-scan

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan/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 spine-scan

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nodewarrior/spine/spine-scan.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,672 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00039 $0.02672
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.01336
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00534
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00267

Measured 9d ago against content hash 2eea6edb19ce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spine-scan 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 9d 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/spine-scan/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Spine Scan — Session-Start Vault Scanner

Automatically scan the Spine vault for decay and coverage gaps. Auto-fixes low-risk issues, reports findings as a non-blocking banner.

Tier 3 Gate

Before doing anything, check if Tier 3 is enabled:

  1. Read ~/.spine/config.json
  2. Check the tier3 field
  3. If tier3 is false or missing, skip silently — do not scan, do not print a banner, do nothing.

This skill only runs when the user has opted into Tier 3 autonomous behavior.

Vault Path Resolution

Resolve the vault path using this config chain:

  1. $SPINE_VAULT_PATH environment variable
  2. ~/.spine/config.json → read the vaultPath field
  3. Default: ~/Documents/SpineVault/

If no vault is found, or the vault directory doesn't exist, skip silently — no banner, no output contract, nothing. Not every repo uses Spine. The output contract is only emitted when the scan actually runs.

Detect Current Repo

basename "$(git remote get-url origin 2>/dev/null)" .git

Fall back to the current directory name if no git remote. If {vault}/{repo}/ doesn't exist, skip silently — this repo isn't tracked by Spine.

Phase 1: Auto-Fixes

Scan the vault for mechanical issues and fix them silently. Log every action to {vault}/.spine/curator-log.md.

Ensure {vault}/.spine/ directory exists before writing.

Conflict Guard

Before reading each file for auto-fix analysis, record its modification time and file size (size catches same-second edits on filesystems with only second-resolution timestamps). Before writing the fix back:

  1. Re-check mtime and size against the recorded values
  2. If either changed, skip the fix for that file and log: **Skipped:** \{file}` — modified by another process during scan`
  3. Proceed with the next file

This prevents overwriting concurrent edits from Obsidian, Obsidian Sync, or parallel sessions. The dual check (mtime + size) handles HFS+/ext4 second-resolution timestamps where a sub-second edit would otherwise be invisible.

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 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. 9d ago First seen · 220 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 2eea6edb19ce

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spine-scan is a skill published in the GitHub repository Nodewarrior/spine (22 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 2,672 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

media-ingest

Ingest video, audio, PDF, book, screenshot, and GitHub repo content into the brain. Multi-format handling with entity extraction and backlink propagation. Covers video-ingest, youtube-ingest, and book-ingest subtypes.

garrytan/gbrain · 52 tokens

mem0-oss-to-platform

Plan and then execute a migration of a project from the mem0 open-source / self-hosted SDK (the local Memory class) to the mem0 Platform / hosted / managed SDK (the MemoryClient class). Use this whenever a developer wants to move, switch, or migrate their mem0 usage off OSS/self-hosted to the hosted API — e.g.…

mem0ai/mem0 · 273 tokens

Cortex

Operate Cortex, the LifeOS memory system — the typed Knowledge Archive (People, Companies, Ideas, Research with typed related: links) plus recall of prior work sessions, ISAs, and conversations. Search, add, harvest, develop, ingest, distill, graph-navigate, recall. USE WHEN cortex, knowledge, knowledge base, search…

danielmiessler/LifeOS · 196 tokens

memory

Use when the user asks to remember, recall, forget, update, search, or inspect durable OpenSquilla memory, including profile facts in USER.md and long-term notes in MEMORY.md or memory//.md.

opensquilla/opensquilla · 44 tokens

ha-data-stores

Map of Hope Agent's local data stores and safe read-only query workflow. Use when the user asks where Hope Agent stores data, wants to inspect sessions/messages/memory/logs/background jobs/knowledge indexes/settings, asks the model to query local app data, or debugging requires checking persisted state. Trigger…

shiwenwen/hope-agent · 115 tokens

establishing-project-context

Use when the user asks to establish shared project language, or project work exposes a conflicting, renamed, or deprecated domain term that needs active semantic modeling. Routine small tasks stay on the fast path.

GanyuanRan/Aegis · 45 tokens