work-operating-model

work-operating-model is a skill for Claude Code from rjmurillo/ai-agents. It costs 102 tokens per session (1,776 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided interview that records how a team actually works, including routines, decisions, dependencies, shared knowledge, and sources of friction. It produces a structured operating model for other agents to use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before an architecture decision, retrospective, roadmap, or workflow customization when you need to understand team practices and decision rights.
Why use it?
It exposes gaps between documented procedures and real practice before those gaps cause problems in planning or architecture decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Part of the project-toolkit plugin — 95 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it before an architecture decision, retrospective, roadmap, or workflow customization when you need to understand team practices and decision rights.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model
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 rjmurillo/ai-agents --skill work-operating-model
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rjmurillo/ai-agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install project-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 95 skills, 26 commands, 33 agents, 4 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 work-operating-model

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model/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 work-operating-model

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rjmurillo/ai-agents/work-operating-model.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,776 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00102 $0.01776
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.00888
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00355
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00178

Measured 4d ago against content hash 5aca273423b5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

work-operating-model 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate_operating_model.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.

.claude/skills/work-operating-model/SKILL.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Work Operating Model

A conversation-first elicitation skill. Surface what is documented, what is tacit, and where the two disagree. Output is a structured operating model that downstream agents (architect, roadmap, orchestrator) can read.

Triggers

Trigger Phrase Operation
elicit operating model Start the 5-layer interview
interview team operating model Start the 5-layer interview
how does this team actually work Start the 5-layer interview
resume operating model interview Continue from the first layer not yet captured or skipped
validate operating model Run scripts/validate_operating_model.py against an output JSON

When to Use

Use this skill when:

  • You need a baseline of team practice before an ADR, retrospective, or scope decision.
  • A new agent or skill needs to be customized to a team's actual cadences and decision rights.
  • A planning conversation keeps getting derailed by missing context about how the team operates.

Do not use this skill when:

  • The question is about code, not people-process. Use the analyst agent.
  • You need a strategic narrative for an external audience. Use the explainer agent.
  • A retrospective is what you actually need. Use the retrospective agent.

Distinction From Adjacent Capabilities

Capability Investigates Output
analyst agent Code, repo state, bug paths Findings document
explainer agent Concepts, decisions for a reader Explainer prose
retrospective agent A bounded past period Learning matrix
work-operating-model Team operating reality (people-process) Structured operating model JSON

The 5 Layers

The interview proceeds in order. Each layer answers one question and produces one section of the output JSON. Skip a layer only when the team explicitly cannot answer it; record the gap in metadata.skipped_layers.

# Layer Question Output Section
1 Rhythms When does work happen, and on what cadence? rhythms
2 Decisions Who decides what, and how is the decision recorded? decisions
3 Dependencies Who do you wait on, and who waits on you? dependencies
4 Institutional Knowledge What lives in someone's head and not in a doc? institutional_knowledge
5 Friction What is broken or slow that the team has accepted? friction

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 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. 4d ago First seen · 131 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A 5aca273423b5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

work-operating-model is a skill published in the GitHub repository rjmurillo/ai-agents (45 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 1,776 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.