start

start is a skill for Claude Code from panayiotism/claude-harness. It costs 45 tokens per session (1,946 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A coding-session startup routine that gathers project context, checks repository status, loads saved memory, synchronizes GitHub information, and reviews current work priorities.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting or restoring a session, checking project status, recovering interrupted work, synchronizing issues, or reviewing feature priorities.
Why use it?
It reduces the time lost reconstructing what happened in an earlier session and helps the agent begin with the project’s current state and pending work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the claude-harness plugin — 6 skills, 1 agent, 8 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when starting or restoring a session, checking project status, recovering interrupted work, synchronizing issues, or reviewing feature priorities.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add panayiotism/claude-harness
Claude Code
/plugin install claude-harness

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-harness, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 1 agent, 8 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 start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/panayiotism/claude-harness/start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/panayiotism/claude-harness/start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/panayiotism/claude-harness/start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/panayiotism/claude-harness/start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,946 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.
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 $0.00045 $0.01946
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00973
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00389
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00195

Measured 8d ago against content hash 680baad07ac5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 8d 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/start/SKILL.md · 144 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 144 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Start - Session Initialization and Context Compilation

Prepare for a new coding session: compile memory context, show status, sync GitHub.

Session ID: ${CLAUDE_SESSION_ID} — session state lives in .claude-harness/sessions/${CLAUDE_SESSION_ID}/.

Current Harness Snapshot (auto-compiled at invocation)

!python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/compile-briefing.py" .claude-harness 2>/dev/null || echo "(harness state not initialized - run /claude-harness:setup)"

Phase 0: Migration Check

Migrations are handled by setup.sh, which the SessionStart hook runs automatically whenever the plugin version changes. Only act here if legacy files are visible at the project root (feature-list.json, feature-archive.json, claude-progress.json, working-context.json, agent-context.json, agent-memory.json, init.sh): run bash {plugin-root}/setup.sh once (plugin root is in the session context) and report what it migrated.

Phase 0.5: Set Paths

  1. Set path variables:
    • FEATURES_FILE=".claude-harness/features/active.json"
    • ARCHIVE_FILE=".claude-harness/features/archive.json"
    • MEMORY_DIR=".claude-harness/memory/"
    • SESSION_DIR=".claude-harness/sessions/${CLAUDE_SESSION_ID}/"

Important: All subsequent phases must use these path variables instead of hardcoded paths.

Phase 1: Context Compilation (Memory System)

The snapshot above already contains the compiled overview (features, recent decisions, failures to avoid, learned rules, last session). Use it directly - do NOT re-read the memory files unless you need detail beyond the snapshot.

  1. Deep-dive reads (only when needed): if the active feature requires filtering memory by relatedFiles, read IN PARALLEL (single message, multiple Read calls) -- memory layers are OKF concept files (markdown with YAML frontmatter), so read each directory's index.md first, then only the relevant concept files:
    • ${FEATURES_FILE} (full feature entries)
    • ${MEMORY_DIR}/failures/index.md (then relevant Failure concepts)
    • ${MEMORY_DIR}/successes/index.md (then relevant Success concepts)
    • ${MEMORY_DIR}/decisions/index.md (then relevant Decision concepts)
    • ${MEMORY_DIR}/rules/index.md (then relevant Rule concepts)

Read the full file on GitHub · 144 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. 8d ago First seen · 144 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 680baad07ac5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start is a skill published in the GitHub repository panayiotism/claude-harness (79 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,946 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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