onboard

A setup command that links a project to a Pad workspace, which is a shared place for managing project tasks, ideas, plans, and documents. It also checks whether the Pad command-line tool is installed and signed in.

In plain words
What is it for?
Initialize a Pad workspace for the current project, check authentication, and explain what to install or configure when setup is incomplete.
Why use it?
A project cannot use Pad until its local folder is connected to a workspace and the account is configured. This checks the setup and points to the required installation or sign-in step.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the pad plugin — 6 skills shipped together

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/perpetualsoftware/pad/onboard
Any agent
npx skills add PerpetualSoftware/pad --skill onboard
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PerpetualSoftware/pad

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install pad, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Per session 11 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 987 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 $0.00011 $0.00987
Opus 5 $0.00005 $0.00494
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00197
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00099

Measured 3d ago against content hash 1b09bd947b08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

onboard 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 3d 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.

plugin/skills/onboard/SKILL.md · 73 lines

What it actually says

Set this project up with Pad. If pad is not on PATH, give the install one-liner from https://getpad.dev/install and stop.

If no .pad.toml exists, first run pad auth whoami (fast and safe: in non-interactive use — which is where you run — it returns immediately rather than waiting on input, and it works regardless of workspace-link state) to check whether this machine is already configured and authenticated:

  • If it reports a real user, it's safe to self-heal: run pad workspace init (a name/--template are optional) to link and create the workspace non-interactively.
  • If it reports "not configured," "session expired," or anything other than a real user, this machine hasn't finished setup yet. Do not run pad init or pad workspace init yourself — pad workspace init now fails fast, non-interactively, with an actionable error instead of hanging (BUG-2538/BUG-2577): "not been initialized yet" pointing at pad auth setup, or "not authenticated" pointing at pad auth login. That error still means only a human at an interactive terminal can finish it, so running it yourself just spends a tool call confirming what pad auth whoami already told you. (With both stdin AND stdout attached to a real terminal it instead drops into the browser auth flow, now bounded at 20 minutes wall-clock — not a state your tool call is ever in.) pad init is not a safer probe either: verified live, it fails fast when stdin/stdout aren't terminals in both states — genuinely unconfigured, and (since BUG-2592) the session-expired sub-case of configured-but-unauthenticated — with the same real-terminal caveat as above, so probing it tells you nothing pad auth whoami didn't. Tell the user to run pad init themselves in an interactive terminal — in Claude Code, suggest they type ! pad init to run it directly in their own terminal. Stop here; there's nothing more this skill can do until that completes.

Once linked, run pad bootstrap --format json, then run the onboard playbook — do not improvise your own setup script. The playbook is workspace-owned and user-editable (PLAN-1496's adaptation posture): a team that has rewritten theirs must get their version from every surface, including this shortcut. Three steps, in this order:

  1. Ensure the playbook is active. Check the bootstrap's playbooks array for invocation_slug=onboard, status=active. If instead an onboard entry exists in a non-active status (draft/deprecated), REACTIVATE it in place (pad item update PLAYB-N --field status=active) — invocation_slug is workspace-unique, so library activation next to an existing entry creates a duplicate or fails on the slug. Only when no onboard playbook exists at all, activate from the library: pad library activate "Onboard a workspace" (activate takes the exact library title; pad library list shows it), or the Web UI's Playbooks → Library.

  2. Load the body and follow it — it IS the script:

    pad playbook show onboard --format markdown
    
  3. Let its mode detection route, and frame needs_onboarding honestly. The playbook's mode argument is auto (default), build, audit, or revisit, plus a separate defaults flag that fast-paths the interview. auto sends a workspace with ANY user-created item to revisit — and needs_onboarding: false means exactly that one fact, NOT that onboarding ever ran. So when it's false, say what exists (collections, active conventions from convention_index), and if the user says the workspace was never really set up, pass an explicit mode=build or mode=audit — the playbook honors the override — rather than expecting auto to pick the fuller pass, and rather than declaring setup complete yourself.

Create items only after the user confirms the shape — the same confirm-before-creating rule as everywhere else.

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. 3d ago First seen · 73 lines · 11 tokens per session scan A 1b09bd947b08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

onboard is a skill published in the GitHub repository PerpetualSoftware/pad (146 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 11 tokens to every session and 987 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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