create-task

A guide for turning an ongoing conversation into a defined software task with a clear scope and saved task information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create task files, capture the requested outcome, and establish the scope before asking for clarification or making a plan.
Why use it?
It prevents important intent and decisions from being lost when work moves between planning, coding, review, and shipping.

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/patforna/auto-task/create-task
Any agent
npx skills add patforna/auto-task --skill create-task
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/patforna/auto-task

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,814 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 $0.00052 $0.03814
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01907
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00763
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00381

Measured 2d ago against content hash ebb04f7bee6d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

create-task 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.

skills/create-task/SKILL.md · 318 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 318 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Create Task

Usage

/at:create-task [further user instructions]

Goal

Crystallise and scope an ongoing conversation into a well-defined task, capturing user intent at a high level.

Context

This skill is typically run as part of a larger workflow:

create-task → clarify-task → plan-task → impl-task → review-code → review-task → ship-task

As steps (e.g. clarify, plan, impl, review) typically run in new sessions, it's imperative that the task file plus repo state carry everything the next agent needs.

Task Store and Project Config

Task-store location, task-file naming and numbering, attachments, and config-file precedence are all owned and resolved by /at:config — read settings from the resolved block (see Step 0), not from restated defaults here. The three config layers share one format: shipped defaults (auto-task.config.defaults.md) ← project (.claude/auto-task.config.md, committed) ← local (.claude/auto-task.config.local.md, gitignored, wins on conflict). /at:config § Heading → Setting Map lists the recognised sections.

Guidance (DO NOT IGNORE!)

These rules govern both how you gather intent and write the task. Internalise and follow them throughout.

  • The audience is the implementing agent, with full repo access — not a human catching up on the project. Every line must earn its place for that reader.
  • Be maximally succinct. Capture the user's intent with the fewest words that remove ambiguity. Task content length obviously follows complexity but don't pad.
  • When a task has an authoritative attachment (design brief, spec, report), don't restate its content. Only capture decisions or information that's additional to the attachment.
  • Don't spell out what a capable agent infers from the repo - established conventions (e.g. fail-fast), the single obvious mechanism for a change, enum values readable from a table. Test per line: would two reasonable agents build the same thing without it?
  • Use plain English. Write like a human agile BA/PM writing a user story, not like a technical writer or AI producing a spec.
  • Prefer short sentences and bullet points over paragraphs.
  • Minimise use of backticks, emphasis, file paths, symbol names, and code mechanics - exact names and details get resolved in later stages.
  • Read code to understand, not to transcribe. Read enough to describe the task accurately.
  • Match scope exactly. For example: don't bundle "review X, then fix it". A review task ends at the review report; a fix task ends at the fix.
  • Avoid AI-slop at all costs - both verbosity and language like "categorised by theme and priority", "promote into guardrails", "earned their keep".

Read the full file on GitHub · 318 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 · 318 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A ebb04f7bee6d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

create-task is a skill published in the GitHub repository patforna/auto-task (3 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,814 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.