align

A short alignment check that states how the agent understands the request, audience, scope, and intended result before work begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for ambiguous requests or tasks where the desired outcome requires interpretation.
Why use it?
It exposes wrong assumptions early, before they turn into a finished answer or implementation.

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/pandysp/claude-plugins/align
Any agent
npx skills add pandysp/claude-plugins --skill align
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pandysp/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 106 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 993 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 $0.00106 $0.00993
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00496
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00199
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00099

Measured 2d ago against content hash f90d9dfd70fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

align 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.

plugins/align/skills/align/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Align: share understanding before acting

The most expensive failures aren't bad outputs. They're outputs built on a wrong premise. By the time the user sees prose, you've silently committed to: your reading of the request, your chosen approach, your interpretations of source, your register and format choices, and a hundred small fill-ins for things that weren't specified. Each commitment looks authoritative once written.

This skill inverts that. Before producing any artifact, produce a manifest: a structured, scannable summary of every silent commitment. The user reacts. Drafting happens after.

The manifest

Output exactly five blocks. Target <60 seconds to read. If a block balloons, the source is thin or the scope is too broad. Surface that, don't pad.

Tag every item:

  • [grounded]: directly stated in the prompt or source.
  • [inferred from "X"]: derived from grounded content; show the chain.
  • [mine]: autonomously introduced; no derivation from source.

Tags answer different questions: grounded → confirm, inferred → correct the premise, mine → accept or override.

Block 1: My read of the task

Paraphrase the request. State the audience. State why this matters / what it's for. Note any timing constraints. Form details (length, voice, structure) belong in Block 4.

Block 2: My approach

Describe the method. Include scope: what to do AND what to explicitly NOT do. Surfaces silent strategy commitments. Asked for a draft, got a strategy doc; asked for a bug fix, got a refactor.

Block 3: What I'm working with

Two parts:

  1. Source coverage: what's in the source, tagged.
  2. What I'd invent if not stopped: explicit list of plausible-sounding details you'd otherwise fabricate.

The "what I'd invent" callout is the anti-fabrication bell. Forcing enumeration makes invention visible; details that would have slipped uncited get surfaced as choices.

Format:

- Source fact `[grounded]`
- Derivation from source `[inferred from "..."]`

**What I'd invent if not stopped:**
- A plausible detail not in source
- A specific number or date the source doesn't mention

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 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 · 79 lines · 106 tokens per session scan A f90d9dfd70fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

align is a skill published in the GitHub repository pandysp/claude-plugins (5 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 993 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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