start

start is a skill for Claude Code from psenger/ai-agent-skills. It costs 154 tokens per session (996 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A work-starting workflow for the ai-agent-skills GitHub repository. It handles either an existing GitHub issue or a new work request.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to fetch and verify an issue, or classify a new request as a feature or bug and draft its requirements before development begins.
Why use it?
It provides a defined starting process for confirming identity, checking the requested work, and preparing the correct branch.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the psenger-skills plugin — 14 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to fetch and verify an issue, or classify a new request as a feature or bug and draft its requirements before development begins.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install psenger-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills.

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 start

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/start.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/start)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/start"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/psenger/ai-agent-skills/start.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 154 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 996 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 $0.00154 $0.00996
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00498
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00199
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00100

Measured 8d ago against content hash 26a70640a91a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

start 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 8d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • start — 95% identical, 3 lines differ
  • start — 86% identical, 79 lines differ
.claude/skills/start/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.

Start

Begins a new piece of work. Two modes — the skill determines which applies:

  • User provides an issue number, URL, or reference → EXISTING ISSUE mode
  • User provides a description of what needs doing → NEW ISSUE mode

For branch naming and commit format, follow the conventions skill.


Step 0 — Auth & Identity

Check for a GitHub MCP server in available tools. If none, run:

gh auth status

If neither is available, stop: "I need the GitHub MCP server or gh CLI authenticated to continue. Run gh auth login or connect the GitHub MCP server."

Confirm identity — use mcp__github__get_me if the GitHub MCP server is available, otherwise:

gh api user --jq '"@\(.login) — \(.name)"'

Show the result and ask: "I'll be acting as @username — is that right?" Wait for confirmation before continuing.


EXISTING ISSUE Mode

Step 1 — Fetch the Issue

From the issue number or URL, fetch the issue:

gh issue view <number> --json number,title,body,labels,url

Display the issue number, title, and first few lines of the body. Ask: "Is this the right issue to work on?" Wait for confirmation.

Step 2 — Start from Main

git checkout main
git pull origin main
git status --porcelain   # must be empty — abort if dirty

Step 3 — Cut the Branch

Derive the slug from the issue title: lowercase, hyphenated, 2–4 meaningful words, no stop words.

Determine branch prefix from issue labels:

  • bug label → fix/
  • enhancement or feature label → feature/
  • Anything else → feature/ by default
git checkout -b <prefix><issue-number>-<slug>

Example: feature/14-add-handoff-skill or fix/23-vault-scribe-toc

Report: "Branch feature/14-add-handoff-skill created from main. You're ready to work."


NEW ISSUE Mode

Step 1 — Classify the Work

From the user's description, determine: is this a feature (new capability, new skill, enhancement) or a bug (something broken, incorrect behaviour, wrong output)?

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 8d ago First seen · 111 lines · 154 tokens per session scan A 26a70640a91a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

start is a skill published in the GitHub repository psenger/ai-agent-skills (10 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 154 tokens to every session and 996 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories