openspec-journal

openspec-journal is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from redhat-developer/rhdh-skills. It costs 147 tokens per session (945 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

An append-only journal for recording important events inside an OpenSpec change, an organized set of files describing a proposed software change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Recording change creation, artifact updates, task status, verification results, decisions, agent handoffs, and archiving through the provided helper script.
Why use it?
It preserves key decisions, task results, and handoffs across long sessions or lost conversation context without storing a full transcript.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the refinement plugin — 13 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/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills/openspec-journal
Any agent
npx skills add redhat-developer/rhdh-skills --skill openspec-journal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install refinement, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 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 openspec-journal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills/openspec-journal.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills/openspec-journal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills/openspec-journal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/redhat-developer/rhdh-skills/openspec-journal.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 945 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 $0.00147 $0.00945
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.00473
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00094

Measured 5d ago against content hash 016a322a7628, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

openspec-journal 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/openspec-journal-precompact-hook.sh, scripts/openspec-journal.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/reference/openspec-journal/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

OpenSpec journal

Write one line of structured, append-only history per load-bearing interaction inside an OpenSpec change, so a change's journal.jsonl becomes a session log that survives context compaction and long-running work — not a full transcript, and not optional narration.

Route

Run the bundled helper that ships with this skill. Resolve scripts/openspec-journal.py next to this skill's SKILL.md (the host skill install path). Do not look for it under the product repo's scripts/ — that path is never installed. Keep the product repo as the working directory so the helper can find openspec/changes/:

python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/openspec-journal.py <change> <event> [k=v ...]
python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/openspec-journal.py <change> show [--limit N]
python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/openspec-journal.py <change> doctor
python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/openspec-journal.py --schema

Run with no arguments for the full usage contract, and --schema for the authoritative event-name -> required-field table. Read those outputs instead of memorizing the vocabulary — the script is the single source of truth for it, so a caller who invents its own field name or event name gets a rejection, not a silent write.

Turn bookending is the default discipline

Whenever the active working directory is inside an OpenSpec change, bookend every user turn with two writes, independent of whether any file changed:

  1. Before starting work, log turn.start input="<paraphrase of the ask, <=200 chars>".
  2. After finishing, log turn.end output="<what changed, was decided, or was answered>".

Writing the input before doing the work is a commitment device against post-hoc rationalization. This applies to every prompt, including pure Q&A turns with no file changes.

Ordering and length

Events describe things that already happened — log change.created after openspec new change <name> succeeds, not before. input/output are rejected (exit 2) above 200 characters so the caller rewrites shorter rather than truncating silently; move long content into design.md or an ADR and point at it (output="See design.md §3 for full rationale.").

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 5d ago First seen · 84 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 016a322a7628

Subscribe to this mod's changes

openspec-journal is a skill published in the GitHub repository redhat-developer/rhdh-skills (16 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 945 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

chronicle

Analyze Copilot session history for standup reports, usage tips, session search, and session reindexing. Use when the user asks for a standup, daily summary, usage tips, workflow recommendations, wants to search or find past sessions by keyword/file/PR, wants to reindex their session store, or asks about deleting…

microsoft/vscode · 72 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens