assess-context

assess-context is a skill for Claude Code from pjt222/agent-almanac. It costs 90 tokens per session (3,425 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reasoning check for deciding whether a complex task can still be adapted or needs a new approach. It separates fixed parts from parts that can change easily.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess a task before changing direction, review the health of a long multi-step process, or decide whether to continue, adjust, or rebuild.
Why use it?
It helps when work feels stuck and repeated workarounds suggest the current approach may be wrong. It also shows what existing context can be kept during a pivot.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the agent-almanac plugin — 122 skills, 76 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess a task before changing direction, review the health of a long multi-step process, or decide whether to continue, adjust, or rebuild.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context
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 pjt222/agent-almanac --skill assess-context
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pjt222/agent-almanac

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-almanac, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 122 skills, 76 agents.

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 assess-context

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context/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 assess-context

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pjt222/agent-almanac/assess-context.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,425 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Anti-Refusal · line 52
    Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.
    Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00090 $0.03425
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01713
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00685
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00343

Measured 5d ago against content hash 8ac2a89047c4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

assess-context 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 5d 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.

i18n/caveman-lite/skills/assess-context/SKILL.md · 264 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 264 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Assess Context

Evaluate the current reasoning context for malleability — identifying which elements are rigid (cannot change), which are flexible (can change cheaply), where transformation pressure is building, and whether the current approach has the capacity to adapt if needed.

When to Use

  • When a complex task feels stuck and it is unclear whether to push through or pivot
  • Before a significant approach change to assess whether the current reasoning structure can support it
  • When accumulated workarounds suggest the underlying approach may be wrong
  • After heal or awareness has identified drift but the appropriate response (continue, adjust, or rebuild) is unclear
  • When context has grown long and it is unclear how much can be preserved versus how much needs to be rebuilt
  • Periodic structural health check during extended multi-step tasks

Inputs

  • Required: Current task context and reasoning state (available implicitly)
  • Optional: Specific concern triggering the assessment (e.g., "I keep adding workarounds")
  • Optional: Proposed pivot direction (what might the approach need to become?)
  • Optional: Previous assessment results for trend analysis

Procedure

Step 1: Inventory Reasoning Form

Catalog the structural components of the current reasoning approach without judgment.

Structural Inventory Table:
┌────────────────────┬──────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┐
│ Component          │ Type         │ Description                      │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Main task          │ Skeleton     │ The user's core request — cannot │
│                    │              │ change without user direction     │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Sub-task breakdown │ Flesh        │ How the task is decomposed —     │
│                    │              │ can be restructured               │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Tool strategy      │ Flesh        │ Which tools are being used and   │
│                    │              │ in what order — can be changed    │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Output plan        │ Flesh/Skel   │ The expected deliverable format  │
│                    │              │ — may be constrained by user     │
│                    │              │ expectations                      │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Key assumptions    │ Skeleton     │ Facts treated as given — may be  │
│                    │              │ wrong but are load-bearing        │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Constraints        │ Skeleton     │ Hard limits (user-imposed, tool  │
│                    │              │ limitations, time)                │
├────────────────────┼──────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Workarounds        │ Scar tissue  │ Patches for things that didn't   │
│                    │              │ work as expected — signals of     │
│                    │              │ structural stress                 │
└────────────────────┴──────────────┴──────────────────────────────────┘

Read the full file on GitHub · 264 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. 5d ago First seen · 264 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A 8ac2a89047c4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

assess-context is a skill published in the GitHub repository pjt222/agent-almanac (32 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 3,425 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 2026-09-03.

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