project-spine-kickoff

project-spine-kickoff is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PetriLahdelma/project-spine. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,389 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided setup process for Project Spine, a system that creates shared project instructions and supporting documents for coding agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Starting a new project, choosing a template, editing its brief, compiling the instructions, and reviewing the generated files.
Why use it?
It turns a project brief and the current repository into consistent instructions, reducing repeated explanations about how the project should be worked on.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions AGENTS.md.

Good fit Starting a new project, choosing a template, editing its brief, compiling the instructions, and reviewing the generated files.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff
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.

Any agent
npx skills add PetriLahdelma/project-spine --skill project-spine-kickoff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PetriLahdelma/project-spine

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 project-spine-kickoff

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for project-spine-kickoff

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/petrilahdelma/project-spine/project-spine-kickoff.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,389 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 $0.00084 $0.01389
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00694
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00139

Measured 11d ago against content hash bda5631e57d0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

project-spine-kickoff 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 11d 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/project-spine-kickoff/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Kickoff flow for a new project

Goal: produce the 21 canonical Project Spine files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md, .cursor/rules/project-spine.mdc, plus scaffold/QA/rationale docs) from a real brief + the current repo.

Prerequisites — check before proceeding

  1. CLI installed: spine --version returns 0.9.2-beta.0 or later
  2. Current directory is the project root (has package.json or equivalent)
  3. No .project-spine/ directory yet (if there is, this is probably a drift scenario — switch to project-spine-drift)

List available starter templates:

spine template list

Bundled templates cover these project types:

  • saas-marketing — marketing site (hero, pricing, customer pages, compliance)
  • app-dashboard — authenticated product with data tables, settings, role gating
  • design-system — component library, tokens, Storybook
  • docs-portal — technical documentation site
  • api-service — Node / TypeScript API service with health and readiness probes
  • monorepo — pnpm / Turborepo / Nx workspace guidance

If the user mentions one of these project types, pick the matching template. If they describe something unusual (extension, CLI tool, data pipeline), skip the template and compile without it — the brief carries the intent.

Step 2 — scaffold

spine init --template <template-name>
# or, without a template:
spine init

This creates:

  • brief.md at the repo root, with prompts for each section (Goals, Audience, Constraints, Assumptions, Risks, Success criteria)
  • .project-spine/ directory for outputs

Step 3 — ask the user for brief content

Do not fill the brief yourself from general knowledge. Ask the user directly:

I scaffolded a brief at brief.md. To generate useful agent instructions I need your help filling a few sections. Could you tell me:

  1. What are the 3–5 core goals for this project? (measurable, not aspirational)
  2. Who is the audience? (role, scale, prior tools)
  3. Any hard constraints? (stack, compliance, budget)
  4. What's out of scope that you want agents to not touch?

I'll fill the rest from the repo analysis.

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 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. 11d ago First seen · 111 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A bda5631e57d0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

project-spine-kickoff is a skill published in the GitHub repository PetriLahdelma/project-spine (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,389 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.