project_setup

project_setup is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RandyNorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill. It costs 184 tokens per session (5,466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A project setup process that turns an initial product idea into a planned software project. It asks detailed questions about users, scope, technology, accessibility, security, operations, and release requirements before implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a product contract, choose a suitable stack, plan quality checks, and prepare project documentation and release arrangements.
Why use it?
It exposes missing decisions and risks before code and dependencies make them expensive to change.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Installs and runs on its own, but its text points at files inside its plugin — anything it tells you to read at a ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} path is only there once the plugin is installed. Installing the plugin gets both.

Part of the high-quality-projects-skill plugin — 2 skills shipped together

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/randynorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill/project_setup
Any agent
npx skills add RandyNorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill --skill project_setup
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RandyNorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install high-quality-projects-skill, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 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 project_setup

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randynorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill/project_setup.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/randynorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill/project_setup)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/randynorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill/project_setup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randynorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill/project_setup.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 184 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,466 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 $0.00184 $0.05466
Opus 5 $0.00092 $0.02733
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.01093
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00547

Measured 4d ago against content hash 01d182dae8f1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

project_setup 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 4d 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_setup/SKILL.md · 499 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 499 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Project setup — discovery before commit one

Scaffold a new project with a confirmed product contract and the strictest practical standards for its stack. The argument is the initial project description. Use it to seed discovery; even a detailed description does not silently waive the Grill Me readiness gate.

Communication style

Status updates to the user: short, direct, no filler. Caveman style if the caveman plugin is active.

Never compress: code comments, documentation, PLAN.md rationale, architectural reasoning, security notes, or commit messages. Brevity applies to chat only. A terse status line and a thorough PLAN.md are not in tension.

Locating this package

Paths below use ${SKILL_ROOT}/... as a placeholder for this package's root, including its scripts/, templates/, and skill resources. Resolve it once with the active shell. On Windows PowerShell:

$SkillRoot = & 'C:\path\to\high-quality-projects-skill\scripts\skill-root.ps1'

On Linux, macOS, or another POSIX environment:

SKILL_ROOT="$(bash /path/to/high-quality-projects-skill/scripts/skill-root.sh)"

Both root scripts locate themselves, so they work from a plain clone, a vendored copy, or a submodule with no environment set. They honour SKILL_ROOT, then CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT under Claude Code. Do not invoke Windows bash.exe: it can exist as a WSL relay even when /bin/bash does not.

Nothing here is specific to one vendor. If your agent cannot run shell commands, read the files directly out of the repository — the templates are plain config files and the phases below are plain instructions.

Rule zero: scan, reuse, then create

Run this before anything else, even when the directory looks empty:

$Scan = & "$SkillRoot\scripts\detect-stack.ps1" . | ConvertFrom-Json

Or from a POSIX shell:

"${SKILL_ROOT}/scripts/detect-stack.sh" .

It returns JSON: languages present, config files that already exist, tools installed on this machine. Supplement it with a read-only search for existing code, components, types, schemas, tests, documentation, design-system files, brand assets, infrastructure, and generated-code boundaries. Then:

Read the full file on GitHub · 499 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 4d ago First seen · 499 lines · 184 tokens per session scan A 01d182dae8f1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

project_setup is a skill published in the GitHub repository RandyNorthrup/high-quality-projects-skill (1 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 184 tokens to every session and 5,466 once invoked, about $0.0009 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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