A starting-point guide for a Main Branch business workspace. It checks the workspace and the user's request, then sends them to the appropriate task or command.

Starting or returning to a workspace, checking setup and readiness, handling saved or unsaved work, syncing, updating, repairing, and choosing the next business task.

It removes the need to know which tool or workflow to use first. It also explains workspace status in business terms before showing technical details.

How noontide-co/mainbranch configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to noontide-co/mainbranch. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/noontide-co/mainbranch/main/.claude/skills/mb-start/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/noontide-co/mainbranch

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mainbranch, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/noontide-co/mainbranch/mb-start.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 5,266 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 warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Rogue Agent · line 155
Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.

Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
medium Agent Snooping · line 253
Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.

Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00076	$0.05266
Opus 5	$0.00038	$0.02633
Sonnet 5	$0.00015	$0.01053
Haiku 4.5	$0.00008	$0.00527

Measured 9d ago against content hash 1847b7a2b2f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mb-start 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.

.claude/skills/mb-start/SKILL.md · 501 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 501 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Start

Single entry point: detect business state, intent, save/sync posture, and the smallest useful next route.

Router and language contract

This skill routes; it is not the worker for coordinated output. Use references/router-and-language.md as the business router before presenting a menu. Business language comes first. Say saved checkpoint, unsaved local work, catch up, sync, reconcile, shared repo, workspace, and provider readiness. Keep raw git terms, checkpoint ids, branch names, origin, ahead, behind, rebase, and commit out of the first response unless the user asks for technical detail or the exact command must be shown.

When summarizing repo state, count pushes/ records, flag campaigns/ as legacy only, and use core/vocabulary.md display words (real paths in commands).

CLI facts first: Once the business repo path is known, run mb status --json --peek before asking setup or routing questions. Treat JSON as source of truth for update severity, readiness, drift, onboarding, integrations, GitHub, team, bets, dirty git, since-last-check, content_strategy, money_path, validation.file_contracts, and ranked_actions. Use GitHub author_display/author_known when naming people. Parse the full JSON once; do not slice status output with head or sed.

Shared source: The portable daily start/status workflow contract lives in workflows/mb-start-status/workflow.md; this skill is its Claude shell.

Shared contract markers: Keep these aligned with the shared source.

Required commands:

mb status --json --peek
mb start --json
mb doctor repair --plan Required fact paths:
money_path
money_path.policy
money_path.policy.thresholds_declared
money_path.active_bets
money_path.active_bets.unanchored
money_path.active_bets.over_cap
money_path.objects.proof.quality
validation.file_contracts
content_strategy
ranked_actions
update
readiness
readiness.dimensions.repo_runtime
readiness.dimensions.business_memory
drift.items
runtime.codex_cli
runtime.claude_code
since_last_check
journal
checkpoint
onboarding
integrations
github
topology.repo_boundary
brain.bets
brain.bets.active
brain.bets.due_soon
brain.bets.overdue
brain.bets.exit_criteria
brain.bets.exit_criteria.missing
brain.bets.exit_criteria.triggered_failure_signals
brain.bets.exit_criteria.triggered_double_down_signals
vocabulary Approval gates: updates_repairs_migrations, file_writes, checkpoint, provider_mutation, publishing_or_spend, customer_contact, private_data, destructive_operations, and status_marker.

Read the full file on GitHub · 501 lines

Files

What ships with it

11 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.

9d ago First seen · 501 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A 1847b7a2b2f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mb-start is a skill published in the GitHub repository noontide-co/mainbranch (39 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 5,266 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.

Claude Code Planning Project management ai-agents cli markdown open-source

alive:create-walnut

Something new is emerging. A venture, an experiment, a person entering the orbit, a life area getting serious. It needs its own walnut — its own identity, history, and future. Scaffolds the full structure, maps existing context sources, and optionally migrates files across.

alivecontext/alive · 63 tokens

mainbranch: Skill for Claude Code

Borrowing it

Wrote this? Show the measurements

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

How it starts

Start

Router and language contract

What ships with it

What this file has done since we first saw it

Other skills, from other repositories

alive:create-walnut

alive:bundle

alive-bundle

alive-create

alive-project

Meeting Action Extractor