catch-up

A plain-language project recap for when you have been away while coding agents worked. It explains what changed, why it changed, and which decisions still need your input.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to catch up on agent work, review the reasons behind changes, and identify open choices.
Why use it?
It saves you from reading code or a long list of edits to understand the current state and regain control of the project.

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/petekp/claude-code-setup/catch-up
Any agent
npx skills add petekp/claude-code-setup --skill catch-up
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/petekp/claude-code-setup

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 166 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,938 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 $0.00166 $0.01938
Opus 5 $0.00083 $0.00969
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00388
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00194

Measured 2d ago against content hash aed3c158ebfc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

catch-up 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/catch-up/SKILL.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Catch Up

The person reading this has been away. While they were gone, agents (you and others) moved the project forward. They are juggling several projects like this one and do not read the code closely. Your job is to get them back in the driver's seat in under a minute: what changed, why it changed, and where their input would actually steer things.

That framing decides everything below. They cannot act on a diff or a commit list, so do not give them one. They can act on plain ideas and clear choices, so give them those.

What good looks like

  • Plain English, zero jargon. Every technical term either gets translated or explained the first time it appears. If a reader who has never seen the code would stumble on a word, rewrite it. See Translating jargon.
  • Altitude, not inventory. Group changes by what they mean, not by file. One idea per bullet. The headline is the thing, not the line count.
  • The why is the payload. The diff says what changed; only the conversation says why. The reader steers on the why, so make sure it survives.
  • Surfaces the forks. The single most useful thing you can give a steerer is the list of decisions that are still open, or were made by default and could be reversed. That is where their attention belongs.
  • Honest. If something is half-done, untested, or went sideways, say so. A catch-up that hides loose ends makes steering worse, not better.

How to do it

1. Find the starting line

State the window you are summarizing, in one short phrase, so the reader knows the frame. Infer it from the conversation, in this order:

  1. A previous catch-up. Scan the transcript for the last time you ran this skill (your own output, led by a window line like the ones below). If you find one, summarize only what happened after it. This is the common case when they check in repeatedly.
  2. A clear milestone. A merge, a shipped PR, a finished plan, or an explicit "let's start on X" is a natural starting line. Summarize since then and name it: "Since the auth refactor merged".
  3. The session start. If neither of the above is clear, summarize the whole session and say so: "This session so far".

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 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 · 169 lines · 166 tokens per session scan A aed3c158ebfc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

catch-up is a skill published in the GitHub repository petekp/claude-code-setup (45 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 166 tokens to every session and 1,938 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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