necessary-work

necessary-work is a skill for Codex from OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin. It costs 47 tokens per session (781 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A scope-checking method for defining only the work required by a request. It produces a bounded contract and identifies the smallest proof needed, but does not perform the work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before implementation when the task may already be finished, may grow unnecessarily, or calls for only the minimum work.
Why use it?
It helps stop tasks from expanding beyond what the user asked for.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the odin-core plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it before implementation when the task may already be finished, may grow unnecessarily, or calls for only the minimum work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/necessary-work
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 OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin --skill necessary-work
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin

Made for: Codex.

Or install odin-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 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.

agentmods badge for necessary-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/necessary-work.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/necessary-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/necessary-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin/necessary-work.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 781 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 $0.00047 $0.00781
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00391
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00156
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00078

Measured yesterday against content hash c16b84c8708e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

necessary-work 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 yesterday.

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.

plugins/odin-core/skills/necessary-work/SKILL.md · 42 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 42 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Necessary work

Contract

Field Bound contract
Trigger Work is about to grow past the ask, the task may already be done, or the user requests the minimum, only what is needed, or a stop once it works.
Authority Read-only. No file, VCS, credential, paid, published, deployed, or remote mutation. Reads and assesses request, environment, policy, and evidence only.
Side effect Narrow the scope of work by classification only; produce no operational side effect.
Done The contract is written before work, every admitted action fails the delete test, and classification stops once the minimum proof is identified.

Inputs

Supply the request and the available evidence of its current state. Include any binding environmental limits or authoritative policies that constrain the outcome. Existing measurements are optional; do not create measurements unless the delete test establishes that they are necessary. If the request is ambiguous and the available inputs cannot resolve it, use the smallest interpretation consistent with the stated intent and record that interpretation.

Procedure

  1. Write the contract before admitting work: state the requested outcome and the minimum evidence that would prove it. Done when: the outcome and its proof requirement are stated in writing.
  2. Enumerate only candidate actions that could close a stated outcome or proof gap. Treat no action as automatically necessary because it is useful, conventional, safer, cleaner, or more thorough. Done when: every plausible candidate is listed and none is admitted by default.
  3. For each candidate c, apply the delete test: if deleting c would leave the contract unmet or unproven, admit only the smallest reliable form of c; otherwise reject it. Done when: every candidate has an admit-or-reject decision with its delete-test result.
  4. Admit a limit, threshold, retry, budget, abstraction, artifact, check, process, or follow-up only when its necessity comes from the request, the environment, authoritative policy, or measured evidence. Done when: every admitted action has a named necessity source.
  5. Classify the admitted and rejected candidates without executing them or changing any state. Do not widen scope or invent evidence when an input is missing. Done when: the classification is complete and no state has changed.
  6. Stop as soon as the admitted actions and minimum proof are sufficient for the contract. Do not add speculative follow-up work. Done when: the minimum sufficient set is identified and no further candidate is considered.

Read the full file on GitHub · 42 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. yesterday Changed · -12 tokens per session c16b84c8708e
  2. 3d ago First seen · 42 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 424d7c81deed

Subscribe to this mod's changes

necessary-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository OutlineDriven/odin-claude-plugin (35 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 781 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 2026-09-04.

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