prior-art

prior-art is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from runxhq/runx. It costs 67 tokens per session (941 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A focused prior-art review that inspects selected repository and catalogue sources before a design, draft, or operational decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
It selects and reads a small set of relevant files, gathers citation-backed findings, and recommends reuse, amendment, new work, or stopping when evidence is insufficient.
Why use it?
It helps prevent duplicated work and decisions that conflict with existing tools, standards, plans, or project conventions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It selects and reads a small set of relevant files, gathers citation-backed findings, and recommends reuse, amendment, new work, or stopping when evidence is insufficient.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art
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 runxhq/runx --skill prior-art
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/runxhq/runx

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 prior-art

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art/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 prior-art

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/runxhq/runx/prior-art.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 941 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 warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 32
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00067 $0.00941
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00470
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00188
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00094

Measured 7d ago against content hash bbb454fc017e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

prior-art 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 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (prior-art.mjs), 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/prior-art/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Prior Art

Ground the next decision in sources that were actually inspected.

Direct use

Do the inspection and return the recommendation in the same task. Do not stop after announcing a search plan, ask the operator to enumerate obvious files, or turn bounded discovery into a repository-wide grep.

  1. Start from the operator's objective and current workspace. When exact source_paths are already supplied, reuse them.
  2. Otherwise, make one targeted discovery pass for the smallest likely owning set: repository instructions and conventions, the named product or package, exact active plans or specs implicated by the objective, and adjacent Runx skill manifests. Select at most sixteen files. Listing filenames is discovery, not the prior-art result; continue through inspection.
  3. Invoke the default runner with the objective, chosen paths, and any existing decomposition. Complete its bounded research request, resume it in memory, and return the validated prior-art report—not a narration of what you intend to read.
  4. If the selected evidence is insufficient, return one precise needs_more_evidence result naming the missing source. Do not broaden the search repeatedly or cycle through unrelated skills.

Routine local discovery and reads use the host's normal authenticated tools and need no approval. Runx adds the catalog projection, digest-bound source bundle, citation validation, reusable packet, and receipt. If Runx is unavailable, preserve the selected paths and findings in the documented output shape so the operator can continue locally without repeating discovery; do not claim a Runx receipt.

Composed use

A parent should pass its objective, decomposition, and already selected source paths. Reuse that evidence boundary exactly. Do not enumerate the repository, reacquire the catalog, or repeat a prior evidence-selection step unless the packet is missing, stale, or outside the current objective.

Executable procedure

  1. Supply a bounded objective, optional work-plan decomposition, and the repo-relative source_paths selected by direct discovery or a parent chain.
  2. Native runx.skill.inspect indexes the local Runx catalog and fs.read_bundle reads and hashes at most sixteen requested files under the workspace boundary. Missing files are recorded; escaping, duplicate, or oversized paths fail closed.
  3. Read only the indexed sources needed for the objective. State each finding as claim, source, relevance, and confidence (verified, likely, or unverified).
  4. Name adjacent catalog skills and the boundary each already owns. Recommend reuse, amend, new_work, or stop; do not create a duplicate primitive because an existing package is imperfect.
  5. The domain validator checks every verified citation and adjacent skill against those native projections. Unsupported verified claims or missing requested sources force needs_more_evidence.

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 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. 7d ago First seen · 94 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A bbb454fc017e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

prior-art is a skill published in the GitHub repository runxhq/runx (84 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 941 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.