live-state-first

live-state-first is a skill for Claude Code from randommonicle/claude-skills. It costs 87 tokens per session (713 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A playbook that says to check the current live state before writing code, SQL, configuration, or test data based on notes or descriptions. Live state means what the system actually contains or does now.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before implementing changes from a README, audit record, handover, memory note, or code comment, especially when those sources conflict.
Why use it?
Documentation, handover notes, and comments can be outdated or disagree with one another. Checking the live system first helps prevent building on incorrect assumptions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Part of the ash plugin — 43 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it before implementing changes from a README, audit record, handover, memory note, or code comment, especially when those sources conflict.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first
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 randommonicle/claude-skills --skill live-state-first
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/randommonicle/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ash, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 43 skills, 3 hooks.

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 live-state-first

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first/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 live-state-first

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/live-state-first.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 713 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 $0.00087 $0.00713
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00357
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00143
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00071

Measured 11d ago against content hash 8e09c3fedde0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

live-state-first 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.

live-state-first/SKILL.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Live state first

The single most-repeated lesson on this machine: twelve-plus recurrences of building against a world that no longer exists — invented columns from a stale handover, a "still open" item carried across four handovers a month after it was done, an audit finding two migrations stale, a reviewer's citation superseded by a later migration. Layer: norm + playbook — the one-line norm in the global CLAUDE.md is the everyday trigger; this file is the depth.

The rule

Every document claim — including the repo's own comments, skills, and FORWARD notes — is a claim, not a fact. Before it becomes an input to code, SQL, config, or a fixture, verify it with one cheap probe of the live source. The latest migration, policy, or config is the truth; when two documents disagree, the catalog settles it.

How to apply

  • One cheap probe before building: a catalog query for schema claims (information_schema, pg_policy, pg_get_functiondef), the deployed surface for behaviour claims, the actual config for settings claims.
  • The file is not the live object, in either direction. The live database routinely runs ahead of main (raw-applied unmerged migrations) and behind the repo (comments and fixes never applied). A migration file's text is evidence of intent, not of state.
  • Query the live distribution, not just the schema, before building on a data assumption — 254 residue rows once would have shipped a correct feature looking broken.
  • Structured data needs a parser, not a grep with context lines. Grep-with-context misled on JSON twice; scope schema greps to the block they describe.
  • Staleness ranks: "still open" items in handovers, path hints in a repo's own docs, and audit trackers are the most likely claims to be stale — they record status at a moment, not state.

What this skill does not do

It does not probe repo state — fetch, PR lists, and identifier ceilings are parallel-work-recon's territory. It does not define migration verification (that is db-migration-verification's post-apply half; this skill is the pre-compose half).

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 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 · 50 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A 8e09c3fedde0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

live-state-first is a skill published in the GitHub repository randommonicle/claude-skills (23 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 713 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.

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