reading-notes

A note-taking workflow for turning a finished book or article into structured, progressively refined notes saved in a resources folder.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to capture a book or article's main argument, key ideas, evidence, quotes, surprises, and other takeaways.
Why use it?
It organizes highlights, remembered ideas, or pasted text so the useful parts remain easy to find and build on later.

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/onebrain-ai/onebrain/reading-notes
Any agent
npx skills add onebrain-ai/onebrain --skill reading-notes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/onebrain-ai/onebrain

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,133 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 $0.00080 $0.01133
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00566
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00227
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00113

Measured 2d ago against content hash c6c1a7754faa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reading-notes 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.

.claude/plugins/onebrain/skills/reading-notes/SKILL.md · 157 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 157 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reading Notes

Turn a book or article into structured, permanent notes using the progressive summarization method, saved to your resources folder.

Usage: /reading-notes [title] or /reading-notes then follow prompts.


Step 1: Get the Book/Article Info

Ask:

What are you taking notes on?

  • Title:
  • Author:
  • Type: book / article / paper / other

Then ask:

Are you: a) Sharing notes/highlights you've already taken : I'll organize them b) Describing the book from memory : I'll structure what you share c) Pasting raw text or quotes : I'll extract and synthesize


Step 2: Gather Content

Based on their answer:

  • a): Ask them to paste their notes/highlights
  • b): Ask open questions: "What were the main ideas? What did you take away? Any memorable quotes?"
  • c): Ask them to paste the text

Take what they give, however messy.


Step 3: Synthesize

From the raw input, extract:

  • Core thesis: What is this book/article fundamentally about?
  • Key ideas: The 3-7 most important concepts
  • Supporting evidence or examples: What supports each idea?
  • Memorable quotes: Exact words worth keeping
  • Surprises or challenges: What contradicted or changed your thinking?
  • Actionable takeaways: What can you do differently because of this?
  • Questions it raised: What do you want to explore further?

Step 4: Choose Subfolder

  1. Glob existing subfolders in [resources_folder]/*/
  2. Suggest a kebab-case subfolder based on the book/article's topic (max 2 levels, e.g. books/productivity or science/neuroscience)
  3. Present to user: "I'd file this under [resources_folder]/[suggested-path]/. OK?"
  4. Use confirmed path for file creation.

Step 5: Create the Note

File: [resources_folder]/[subfolder]/[Book Title] - Notes.md (subfolder confirmed in Step 4)

---
tags: [reference, topic-tag]
created: YYYY-MM-DD
source: /reading-notes
author: [Author]
type: [book/article/paper]
status: [reading/finished]
rating: [1-5 if they want to rate it]
---

# [Book Title]
*by [Author]*

## Core Thesis

[One paragraph : what is this fundamentally about?]

## Key Ideas

### [Idea 1 Title]
[Explanation in your own words]

> "[Supporting quote]"

### [Idea 2 Title]
[Explanation]

### [Idea 3 Title]
[Explanation]

## Memorable Quotes

> "[Quote 1]"
> : [Author], p. [page if known]

> "[Quote 2]"

## My Takeaways

- [What this means for my work/life]
- [What I want to try or apply]

## Questions & Further Exploration

- [Question raised by this book]
- [Related topic to research: [[Related Note]]]

## Raw Highlights

<!-- Paste original highlights here for reference -->
[Raw content if provided]

## Related

[[Related Note 1]]
[[Related Note 2]]

Read the full file on GitHub · 157 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 · 157 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A c6c1a7754faa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reading-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository onebrain-ai/onebrain (25 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,133 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.

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